Slumming
Page 12
Arnold was a regular reader of the Pall Mall Gazette, so it is likely that he followed “A Night in a Workhouse” as it appeared on January 12, 13, and 15, 1866. Surviving evidence suggests that “A Night” remained vivid in his imagination for at least the next five years. The first and the last of the essays and letters he wrote on social questions between 1866 and 1871, which were published as books under the titles Culture and Anarchy (1869) and Friendship’s Garland (1871), pointedly refer to Greenwood’s “A Night.”179 Arnold was reviewing proofs for his jeremiad “My Countryman” when “A Night” first appeared. In “My Countryman” (published in February 1866), Arnold rehearsed many of the key themes that he would later develop in “Anarchy and Authority” and “Culture and Its Enemies.” For Arnold, the weakness of poor-law officials and the pettiness of vestry authorities disclosed by “A Night” and the condition of workhouse infirmaries were examples of what he famously called the “illiberalism of liberalism.”180 These were evidence of the failure of the British state and its ruling classes to educate and elevate the masses.181 A month later, in the first of what proved to be a long series of satirical letters he published in the Pall Mall Gazette between 1866 and 1871, he alluded once again to the malign role of vestrymen in the casual ward scandal. In choosing to publish his letters in the paper that had been so recently made famous by “A Night,” Arnold had reason to assume that his audience would necessarily read his contributions against the backdrop of James Greenwood’s exposé. In his letters to the editor of the Gazette, Arnold criticized English values and state institutions from the perspective of a fictional German tourist named Arminius. When he decided to republish the letters in book form as Friendship’s Garland, he added a foreword, “Dedicatory Letter,” to the volume. Authored by Arnold’s fictional alter ego, “Matthew Arnold of Grub Street,” the dedicatory letter paid lighthearted homage to the Greenwood brothers: “I love to think that the success of the ‘Workhouse Casual’ had disposed the Editor’s heart to be friendly toward pariahs.” Extending this comparison between himself as a “pariah” and a workhouse casual grateful for charity, Arnold’s fictional persona archly observed that “my communication was affably accepted, and from that day to this the Pall Mall Gazette, whenever there is any mention in it of [my friend] Arminius, reaches me in Grub Street gratis.”182 Presumably, his delight in receiving the Gazette “gratis” underscored his putative penury and the high cost of the genteel newspaper.
Despite the jocular tone of the Arminius letters, Friendship’s Garland and Culture and Anarchy articulated Arnold’s longing for the British state to become the efficient organ of “right reason” for the nation. From Arnold’s perspective, many events in 1866 boded ill for the realization of his goal, including the social and sexual dangers Greenwood brought to public attention.183 Public outrage and anxiety over “A Night” contributed to the atmosphere of bourgeois panic with which Arnold and so many of his contemporaries greeted the news that a crowd of Reform Bill demonstrators, reputed to be East End camp followers, had toppled some railings in Hyde Park in the summer of 1866. In “A Night in a Workhouse” Greenwood reported that he was particularly tormented by an incident which parodically adumbrated events in Hyde Park several months later. A drunken man arrived in the Lambeth Casual Ward singing a music-hall tune about his desire to be a “swell a-roaming down Pall Mall, Or anywhere,—I don’t much care, so I can be a swell.” The couplet, which at first had “an intensely comical effect,” grew more and more horrible for Greenwood as other casuals joined in to form a “bestial chorus.” “A Night” ominously revealed that the corrosive spirit of anarchy and rowdyism was no mere phantom of Arnold’s imagination but rather a fearful reality. For a gentlemen to go dressed incognito among the degraded poor was a heroic gesture and a daring novelty; for the poor themselves to invade one of the chief spaces of sociability and recreation of the West End elite, or to even sing about such trespass, was altogether a different matter.
In contrast to Arnold’s depiction of the poor as brutalized, Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré’s treatment of them in London: A Pilgrimage (1872) was sympathetic, almost affectionate.184 The English journalist and the French artist tended to focus more on the triumphs of the poor over adversity than on their spirit of rebellion. London combined Jerrold’s breezy touristic narrative with Doré’s lushly detailed, though not always accurate, illustrations to offer a panoramic view of the entire metropolis. The effect of the whole was to make a powerful argument about the simultaneous geographic and social isolation of groups from one another and their economic interconnections. Late one night as Jerrold took Doré to visit a night refuge in the slums, he explained to his companion that philanthropy in London was organized in such a way that “the relief of the multitude is connected with the pleasures and the Christian charity of the rich.”185 Jerrold was referring to the organization of charitable bazaars and other fund-raising events. His words also apply to the ways in which slumming was a source of “pleasure” and an act of “Christian charity” for the rich.
The written and visual texts of London, in particular Doré’s pair of images entitled “Scripture Reader in a Night Refuge” and “A Bath at the Field Lane Refuge” have notable affinities with Greenwood’s “A Night.” I should emphasize that no direct evidence links “A Night” and London; however, the two works deploy strikingly similar fantasies about disguises, urban space, and relations between elite male social observers and male tramps. As the editor of Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper in 1866, Jerrold was well acquainted with “A Night.”186 Following Greenwood, Jerrold assured the readers of London that the only way for them to gain genuine insight into the lives of the London poor was to “adopt rough clothes” and go among them.187 Doré, like Matthew Arnold and James Greenwood, had a penchant for masquerades and gladly dressed the part of a tramp when he visited the London netherworlds.188 His costume, according to a witness, was “a triumph of vagabondage and Bill Sykes [from Dickens’s Oliver Twist] style of significance.”189 By the time Jerrold and Doré embarked on their joint venture, a tour of the London slums was an essential part of the itinerary of any “thoughtful and serious observer.”190 In his biography of Doré, Jerrold recalled that the pathos and sad beauty of destitute Londoners riveted his French collaborator. Jerrold shared Doré’s attraction to the “picturesque” lives of the poor, which “tempted” him to imagine and write about the “great city’s life and movement.”191
At least three versions of what Doré and Jerrold saw the night they visited the Field Lane Refuge near Smithfield in 1869 have survived: Jerrold’s prose narrative, Doré’s roughly sketched study of paupers bathing at the refuge, and the completed pair of images from the refuge published in London. The differences between these representations are more notable than their similarities. Jerrold’s written narrative concisely recounts the sequence of events. Presumably referring to the recent creation of the Charity Organisation Society, Jerrold offers one of his many criticisms of recent schemes to organize charity along scientific lines when he praises “spontaneous charity to the houseless.” He and Doré then watch a “crowd of tattered and tired out creatures” “being filtered into a refuge.” The superintendent “distributes the regulation lump of bread to the guests, and they pass on, by way of the bath—rigorously enforced for obvious reasons—to the dormitories set out like barracks, and warmed with a stove, which is always the center of attraction. Here, when all are in bed, a Bible-reader reads, comforting, let us hope, many of the aching heads.”192
The placement of Doré’s two illustrations of this scene offers a different chronology. The large full-page image of the “Scripture Reader” (figure 1.3a comes two pages before the much smaller image “In the Bath,” figure 1.3b). Thus the reader of the visual text first meets the male casuals in their thin nightshirts packed onto inclined sleeping boards and only later does one see them bathing. In the “Scripture Reader,” the male casuals are haggard and skeletal. They resemble living corpses entombe
d in a windowless, cell-like dormitory. Many of the men clutch themselves, and the sinuous lines of the bedsheets seem to writhe like snakes. The source of warmth and comfort in Jerrold’s account, the stove, is not visible in Doré’s illustration. The Scripture Reader replaces the stove as the literal “center” of Doré’s representation of the scene.
Many structural elements of Doré’s design ought to reinforce the Reader’s centrality. As the only standing figure, he also provides the illustration’s most important vertical axis. His shadow dramatically doubles the horizontal lines of the pipes above and pulls the viewer’s eye toward him at the apex of a triangle formed by two well-lit sets of bare feet at the extreme bottom right and left, the shadow, and the double railings of the barrack beds. Nonetheless, he is much less visually compelling than the sea of anonymous men ranged around him. Why? I suspect the answer lies in the way Doré intentionally undercuts the Reader’s aspiration to control both the image and the souls of the inmates of the refuge. Whereas Jerrold held out the hope that the Reader could provide comfort to “many of the aching heads,” Doré’s image is less optimistic. Only one man appears to have the energy or the interest to sit up and, perhaps, listen to the Reader. The Reader’s absorption in his text and his audience’s indifference to him suggest the profound alienation of the poor from the church’s spiritual ministry and redirect the viewer away from both the Reader and the “book” toward the men themselves.
Doré’s “In the Bath” presumably depicts a group of five of these same men taking their mandatory dip into the “mutton broth” liquid of a communal bath. But unlike in “Scripture Reader,” the casuals are naked, active, and mostly upright. The men have been transformed beyond recognition. In place of the emaciated figures in “Scripture Reader,” the viewer confronts male bodies more closely approximating a neoclassical ideal than exhausted paupers staving off starvation, except for their torn flesh. The two central bathers are strikingly well-built, much like the “brawny men” whose belated entrance into the casual ward fascinated and frightened Greenwood. One, drawn frontally, contorts his body as if to show off his sculpted upper torso; powerful buttocks and back muscles are the most prominent feature of the other bather, depicted with his backside to the viewer. Doré’s main concession to modesty is concealing the bathers’ genitals from the viewer, although presumably not from the two inspectors/observers who monitor the paupers’ ablutions. The two male inspectors ironically stand in for Doré and Jerrold, as well as for readers of London. They are reminders that the poor, even when they are bathing, are subject to the voyeuristic surveillance of their superiors.193
FIGURE 1.3. From Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, London, A Pilgrimage, 1872.
According to Jerrold’s biography of Doré, Doré tended to take only hasty visual notes as he walked the streets. Doré bragged that he did not need to make detailed studies because his visual memory was almost photographic in its capacity to imprint precise images on the “collodion type” of his brain.194 Fortunately, Jerrold reproduced many of Doré’s unpublished preliminary studies for London, including one for “In the Bath.” Doré most likely executed this hasty and impressionistic notebook sketch (figure 1.6) in situ during his visit to the Refuge with Jerrold. Doré’s study depicts two bathers, both of whom are bent over and visible only from the side. Like the published illustration, the sketch relies on large metal pipes to give vertical and horizontal structure to the image. There is only one inspector, and he is drawn so abstractly that he could be mistaken for the dripping towel hanging on the wall which replaces him in the final illustration. It is impossible to explain why Doré reworked his original sketch into “In the Bath”; however, the changes he made between the two images do provide evidence about how Doré reimagined the scene. If Greenwood transformed himself from a gentleman to a casual by putting on clothes, Doré’s sickly paupers become robust, if still degenerate, athletes simply by taking off their clothes. In Doré’s iconography, figures clothed in rags speak to the misery and poverty of the poor; the naked bodies of poor men, by contrast, suggest an idealized admiration for their raw, primitive, and powerful masculinity.195 Doré’s visual images and Jerrold’s written text recapitulate Greenwood’s ambivalent representations of the male casuals he meets in the sleeping shed and whose bodies he first comes into contact with through the bathwater: they are simultaneously degenerate and strangely attractive.
Perhaps the two best-known works of urban tourism and slum exploration written in the twentieth century, Jack London’s People of the Abyss and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, also participated, like London: A Pilgrimage, in the eroticization of male vagabondage that had been given such wide cultural currency by Greenwood. While neither author mentioned Greenwood, their works are deeply indebted to the tradition of slum writing he had inaugurated with “A Night.”196 London and Orwell, like Greenwood, were perpetually crossing borders—between nations, classes, races, and ideologies. In these crossings, they found themselves and their subjects as writers. This was particularly true for Orwell. Down and Out was not only his first published book, it was also the first time he adopted the pen name George Orwell, by which he remains best known. In publishing Down and Out, Orwell literally became Orwell; he transformed himself from Eric Blair, a disaffected former member of the imperial civil service in Burma into the journalist, writer, and social critic.
FIGURE 1.4. Image executed in 1869, but not published until 1891. (Blanchard Jerrold, Life of Gustave Doré.)
London, the embodiment of robustly independent American manhood, and Orwell, the outcast “shabby genteel” socialist from the “lower upper-middle class,” lived as what the Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams called “exiles” and “vagrants.” Both authors condemned the structures of inequality in society and their consequences for the lives of individuals.197 In his analysis of Orwell in Culture and Society (1958), Williams offered a powerful way to think about the meanings of “exile” and “vagrancy” in British culture. According to him, the exile asserted his (I use the word “his” because exiles and vagrants were both emphatically male for Williams) independence from settled ideas and ways of living, and as a result of doing so, he derived acute critical insights about society’s shortcomings. While the “exile” and the “vagrant” stand outside the familiar comforts of home, “there is usually principle in exile … only relaxation in vagrancy.” “The vagrant,” Williams continued, “in literary terms is the ‘reporter’ … an observer, an intermediary” whose powers of observation surpass his understanding. The exile, by contrast, stringently applies his principles to the task of changing his world rather than merely recording its intractable dilemmas.198 How can Williams help us understand Greenwood, London, and Orwell? How does placing Greenwood at the beginning of a tradition of slum writing shift our understanding of Williams’s seminal analysis in Culture and Society?
Greenwood, London, and Orwell were literally reporters who lived at least part of their lives as vagrants—or disguised as vagrants. London’s People began as an assignment to report on the impact on Londoners of the Boer War.199 By the time he arrived in England, the American Press Association had cancelled his assignment and he was free to pursue the story closest to his heart. Disguised as a tramp, he decided to chronicle conditions in “this human hell-hole called London Town.”200 Like Greenwood before him, London made his slum “dives” and himself into news. Living among the poorest of the poor in London and Paris, Orwell staved off hunger by publishing nonfiction slum stories—which later became the kernels of Down and Out—in both French (Le Progrès Civique) and English journals (Adelphi).
While Orwell openly and frequently acknowledged the influence of Jack London and People on his work, both writers paid indirect—and presumably unintended—homage to Greenwood’s homoerotic adventures by exploring the sexual oddness of slums.201 At the time London wrote People, he was in the midst of maneuvering his way through complicated love affairs with women, only one of w
hom was his pregnant wife.202 His incognito slumming gave him some respite from these pressures and allowed him to enter into the homosocial intimacies of “mateship” and “comradeship” among tramps. In the course of one memorable evening of research, he encountered a sailor who had entirely sworn off women who were, he insisted, too expensive and dangerous for him. The two got drunk, “talked as natural men should talk,” and spent the night together in the same bed.203 Reveling in the democratic familiarity his disguise made possible, London unashamedly extolled the physical beauty and attractiveness of his bedpartner in words that echoed Greenwood’s admiration for Kay. London’s mate could have been one of Doré’s degenerately noble bathers comes to life. His “mouth and lips” were “sweet,” London observed:
His head was shapely, and so gracefully was it poised upon a perfect neck that I was not surprised by his body that night when he stripped for bed. I have seen many men strip, in gymnasium and training quarters, men of good blood and upbringing, but I have never seen one who stripped to better advantage than this young sot of two and twenty, this young god doomed to rack and ruin in four or five short years. (15)
London concluded his description by casting his mate’s distaste for women within the framework of eugenics, not sexuality. His newly found friend, London predicted, will die “without posterity to receive the splendid heritage it was his to bequeath.”204 Throughout the passage, London deflects the very homoeroticism that he conjures. He accounts for his expertise in evaluating naked male beauty by referring to manly homosocial institutions: the gymnasium and the training quarters. He seems disingenuously confused by the discovery that some men, like his beautiful bedpartner, choose not to have sex with women.