by Koven, Seth
Orwell’s Down and Out is much more explicit than either Greenwood’s or London’s work in recognizing slums as “queer” spaces and slumming itself as a means to explore the homosexual subculture of interwar London. In fact, Orwell’s depiction of homosexuality in the slums is so straightforward that it seems hardly possible that critics have said so little about it. Orwell retraces many of Greenwood’s steps. He goes to the slums of Lambeth to purchase an outfit that closely resembles the one Greenwood had so lovingly described in “A Night.”205 As soon as he makes the purchase, he fears that the police might arrest him “as a vagabond.” In light of the Vagrancy Act of 1898, with whose terms Orwell was familiar, his fear may also be interpreted as an anxiety that he will be taken into custody as a “homosexual.” In any case, Orwell eventually makes his way to a casual ward of a workhouse where he, like Greenwood before him, stumbles upon an underworld inhabited by “fifty dirty, stark naked men elbowing each other in a room twenty feet square.”206 He even meets a pauper he calls “Old Daddy”—though this Daddy has none of the playful charm of Greenwood’s original.207 In place of Greenwood’s mutton-broth bath, Orwell must clean himself in a tub “streaked” with the antique filth of other tramps and dry himself using one of the two “slimy roller towels” provided for all the men.208 Each man is allowed to sleep with his special “mate” with “naked limbs constantly touching.” Orwell finally makes explicit the homoerotic tensions that form a connecting thread of Down and Out: about midnight, his “mate” “began making homosexual attempts upon me—a nasty experience in a locked, pitch dark cell…. [The man then told him that] homosexuality is general among tramps of long standing.”209
Unlike Greenwood and London, Orwell openly and often expressed his disgust for homosexuality. In his writing, he never enjoys the sight of a beautiful male body in the casual wards and lodging houses he frequents. Nakedness is utterly unsentimental. Orwell’s world out of clothes reveals only the ravages of social and economic inequalities on the sagging muscles, hollow chests, and potbellies of the tramps.210 He concludes his observations about the slums as queer spaces with an account of a “fashionably dressed” Old Etonian he meets in a common lodging house who, he speculates, went there “in search of the ‘nancy boys.’” While Orwell tried to make Down and Out as literally true as possible, he confided to a friend that the elderly “poof” was not in fact an Etonian but a graduate of “some other well known school.”211 Why did Orwell make him into an Etonian, a graduate of Orwell’s own elite public school? Was this merely a spiteful act by a schoolboy who could not resist sullying the reputation of his alma mater? Or was this yet another example of Orwell’s ambivalent sense of identifying himself with the outcast men he encountered without every having truly to become one of them? After all, the elderly man implicates Orwell in his quest for sex by posing the rhetorical question: “Funny sort of place for you and me, eh?”212 At the very least, the presence of the Old Etonian satirizes the ethos of service and philanthropic benevolence trumpeted by England’s elite public schools—most established missions to the London poor in the 1880s—and reminds readers that public schools, like casual wards and Oxford colleges, remained hotbeds of homosociability and homosexual experimentation in interwar Britain.
The career of Tom Driberg, Orwell’s not-so-shabby-genteel contemporary and a leading Labour Party politician, was in many respects quite similar to Orwell’s in terms of their deep engagement with the lives of the working class and poor.213 But Driberg was only too happy to conflate journalistic forays to see how the poor lived with his relentless pursuit of sex with working-class men. In one episode of his memoir, Ruling Passions, Driberg swaps clothes with a young male beggar in exchange for a night of sex. The next morning, he dons the tattered outfit and plays the part of street beggar. Later hauled into court on charges of indecently assaulting two homeless miners whom he had sheltered in his London flat, Driberg claimed that he was motivated by “philanthropy” and the pursuit of “useful copy” for a story he was writing about labor troubles. His lawyer even produced the newspaper article Driberg had written using the data he had collected from the men—as if the existence of the journalistic artifact proved his client’s innocence.214
Both Driberg and Orwell perpetuated the linkage in the elite male imagination between homelessness and homosexuality, though they did so for very different reasons. Only the Real Casual, the educated but impoverished man in the Lambeth Casual Ward the night Greenwood had visited in January 1866, challenged the erotic framework that elite observers had imposed on the physical intimacies they witnessed between male tramps. Recall that the Real Casual had suggested that men in the casual ward clung together to generate enough heat to endure a freezing night on cold stones. Survival, not sex, was at the heart of the matter for him. Six decades later, another “real casual,” John Worby, wrote his own two-volume memoir chronicling his days and nights tramping across Britain and the United States. When the first volume, The Other Half (1937), appeared, it created a minor sensation, and Worby enjoyed celebrity as the man who spoke not for but as one of “the other half.” Just as the Real Casual’s narrative provides an important counterpoint to Greenwood’s, so, too, do Worby’s stories offer a disturbing companion to Orwell’s tales of queer slumming in the 1930s. Orphaned at four and raised by foster parents for several years, Worby spent his adolescence moving from one harsh boys home to another until he fled to Canada as part of an emigration/farm work program. As soon as Worby escaped the clutches of institutional boy-welfare schemes, he was picked up by a handsome but “curious” and “queer” man named Reg who was driving a Ford coupé and who offered to feed and clothe him, keep him in pocket money, and give him a home. Presenting himself as a naïf, Worby elaborately stages his first homosexual encounter and details the feelings it stirred in him.
When he kept endearing me with his words and caresses I began to get a queer sensation which I could not for all the world of me account for. It was a sort of soothing thrilling feeling which seemed to urge itself on as soon as he touched me. It seemed as if I didn’t want him to take his hand off my thigh and when at last he did take it off I had a feeling of utter loneliness. I had never experienced anything like this before and the fact that I was with a man made it all the more difficult to explain. I wondered and marvelled that a man could talk and act so much like a woman. He kept asking me if I loved him and if I minded him feeling my leg muscles. He said he just loved to do it and hoped I would always be his. I told him I loved him even though I didn’t know what it meant and if he liked to run his hands over me, well I didn’t mind.
Worby’s responses to Reg’s lovemaking suggest that their encounter is one based on mutual sexual attraction and desire and not on the grotesque exploitation of a homeless boy by an older and economically secure man. Worby appears to conform precisely to the expectations of sexologists: he is Greenwood’s Kay reincarnated, the beautiful and sexually promiscuous male tramp whom no reporter or photographer in the 1860s was ever able to find.
But Worby’s “thrilling feelings” soon give way to outright disgust as he realizes that Reg wants to have sex with him. Once Worby figures out that adult men assume that homeless boys are “queer” and available for sex, he ruthlessly reverses the power dynamics by stealing money from Reg and returning to the road. The ostensibly vulnerable adolescent becomes an accomplished exploiter of adult male drag queens, fetishists, and homosexuals. Worby returns to England and makes his way to Trafalgar Square, where he joins the “boys” who teach him the inside tricks involved in conning older men—“mugs” or “steamers”—out of substantial sums of money without giving them the sex they think they have purchased. In contrast, when Worby is picked up by Avril, a very wealthy West End woman addicted to drugs who makes him her “companion” and “lover,” he feels pity and tenderness for her. Because the older men he preys upon while posing as their prey are homosexuals, Worby believes they deserve to have their money stolen. Once he understands the g
ame, Worby is all too happy to invoke the homophobic norms of his society in justifying his thievery. Avril’s relationship to him is every bit as exploitative as Reg’s, but because she wants him to pose as the husband of a wealthy woman, he gladly plays the part and guards her honor with zeal. Worby is genuinely invested in the role of husband and protector even as he understands its falseness.
Worby’s memoirs provide powerful evidence that “queer” and “curious” men with economic resources in Britain and America did assume that adolescent tramps were “rough trade” willing to sell their bodies for a suit of clothes and some cash, but they also show just how canny Worby and the other Trafalgar Square “boys” were in manipulating elite preconceptions to their own advantage. Worby and the older queer men he met were willing participants in a complex sexual masquerade in which boy tramps and men alike were pathetically vulnerable to exploitation and ready exploiters of one another.215 Unlike the Real Casual, who rejected Greenwood’s eroticization of poverty, Worby only confirmed the “truth” that Greenwood had discovered: extreme poverty among men was itself a form of sexual deviance.
Placing “A Night” at the beginning of a tradition of writing about the poorest of the London poor (and as the first chapter of this book) makes visible the complex links between sexual and social politics in modern British history, literature, and culture. I am not arguing that this tradition is exclusively a queer one; far from it. But I am proposing that it is not nearly as straight or as straightforward as Williams and many others have supposed it was. If we follow the logic of “A Night,” of Symonds’s and Ellis’s emerging sexological categories, and of the terms of the Vagrancy Act of 1898 defining the homosexual as vagrant, then we need to rethink the implications of Williams’s concept of the social-critic-asreporter as vagrant. The reporter writing about vagrancy; the reporter posing as a vagrant; the vagrant as homosexual; the reporter as homosexual: these sets of closely-associated terms generated by “A Night” and its many nineteenth- and twentieth-century legacies seem to proliferate, each opening up new lines of inquiry.
Chapter Two
DR. BARNARDO’S ARTISTIC FICTIONS: PHOTOGRAPHY, SEXUALITY, AND THE RAGGED CHILD
AS LONDONERS opened their newspapers to devour the latest disclosures about workhouse abominations in January and February of 1866, the Times asserted its dignity by declaring that it had “no sympathy with the professional philanthropy which makes a pet of everything depraved.” Nonetheless, it could not resist challenging its readers and the investigative prowess of the so-called Amateur Casual (James Greenwood) of its junior rival the Pall Mall Gazette to “dare the horrors of the commonest of common lodging houses” which, the paper implied, would surpass workhouse casual wards as dens of vice and depravity.1 A few weeks later, Thomas John Barnardo, the young Anglo-Irishman who would take up this unsavory challenge, first arrived in the metropolis to live and evangelize among the poor of East London. In homage to Greenwood’s nom de plume as the Amateur Casual, Barnardo playfully called himself the Amateur Tramp several years later when he disguised himself in the rags of poverty to investigate lodging houses. He had left his native Dublin and its millenarian religious community of Plymouth Brethren determined to study medicine at the London Hospital in Whitechapel and then to devote his talents to serving God by joining Hudson Taylor’s Inland Medical Mission to China. But the achingly desperate childhood poverty he daily encountered as he walked the congested streets and decaying alleyways surrounding the hospital utterly changed his plans and his life’s vocation. He never made it farther east than East London, and some of his contemporaries questioned whether he had studied long and hard enough to deserve the title Doctor Barnardo, the name by which he still remains well known throughout Britain and the world. One of the Victorian age’s best known philanthropists, he proved himself a master publicist, inveterate self-promoter, and controversialist. Even a century after his death, the romance of his life and the audacity of his philanthropic schemes still capture headlines, in part because the organization he founded remains one of the world’s best-known child welfare agencies. As recently as 1995, BBC television aired a poignant six-hour series critically assessing Barnardo’s life and the work of his organization from the 1860s onward. The Independent ran a Sunday magazine cover feature on his photographic archives.2
What accounts for such broad public interest in Barnardo’s history? For many, the ubiquity of homeless people—the “street arabs” of Barnardo’s day—visually confirms their suspicion that the post–World War II welfare state has failed and emboldens them to call for its abandonment. The supposed inefficacy of the state’s interventions has led some to reexamine how Victorians dealt with the poorest of the poor and to look toward the revival of so-called Victorian values of self-reliance, minimal central government, and voluntarism (both secular and religious) as the cornerstones of contemporary social policy.3 According to Gertrude Himmelfarb, the most influential and persuasive academic proponent of neo-Victorianism, the on-going crisis in welfare is a result of the demoralization of society.4 The solution, she insisted, must be to recover those certitudes that united Victorians in their commitment to making morals central to all debates about welfare. In a New York Times op-ed piece in the midst of a political controversy in the United States Congress over the advantages of boys homes and orphanages, Himmelfarb pointed to Dr. Barnardo as an exemplary Victorian moralist and invited her readers to reconsider his methods of child rescue. Himmelfarb is far too learned and astute a scholar to romanticize the Victorians or Barnardo. In a Wall Street Journal article she published soon thereafter, she acknowledged that any assessment of the Victorian past would have to take into account the “social and sexual discriminations … the constraints and inhibitions” of the age. Nonetheless, she enjoined us “to relearn the [Victorian] language of virtue” which, she averred, was not tainted by the discriminatory contexts of its production, and “apply that language to social policy.”5
In this chapter, I take up all of Professor Himmelfarb’s suggestions. I concur with her that Barnardo is an exemplary Victorian moralist. I, too, believe we have much learn by studying his language of virtue. But unlike Himmelfarb, I do not believe that his language of virtue can be separated from the social and sexual contexts of its production and reception. I will show that Barnardo’s written and visual language of morality was so compelling because it was embedded in “social and sexual discriminations … constraints and inhibitions” that it not only criticized but also reproduced. This chapter concerns the moral imagination and its implications for the history of private and public provision for the very poor. I suggest that this imagination divided Victorians as much as it united them; that it disturbed them more often than it offered them reassuring platitudes.
My analysis of Barnardo centers on the most painful but also the most pivotal episode in his career in the late summer of 1877. Eleven years before, he had arrived in the metropolis without friends or money to study medicine. He was a charismatic Anglo-Irish outsider in the genteel world of metropolitan philanthropy. His only obvious assets were his religious fervor, his gift for attracting slum children, and his knack for raising large sums of money for his benevolent schemes.6 Diminutive but fiercely self-assertive, Barnardo felt drawn toward what James Greenwood called “our immense army of juvenile vagrants”—the more than one hundred thousand children who wandered the streets of London “destitute of proper guardianship, food, clothing, or employment.” Where Greenwood indicted the “keen-witted, ready-penny commercial enterprise of the small-capital, business-minded portion of our vast community” for exploiting slum children and demanded state legislative intervention, Barnardo focused on saving their souls and on clothing and feeding their bodies.7 He created an array of child rescue institutions, vocational training, and immigration schemes for boys and later girls that laid the foundations of the Barnardo’s philanthropic empire in the century after his death. A talented organizer and demanding leader, Barnardo was not an obedient
foot soldier in the evangelical army combating sin and poverty. He displayed an almost truculent disregard for authority. His incapacity to compromise with others and his unwillingness to accept the dictates of his superiors alienated fellow missionaries and workers at schools for “ragged” children during his first years in East London. Nonetheless, contributions flowed into his East End Juvenile Mission, best known simply as Dr. Barnardo’s, and the institution grew rapidly in the early 1870s. At a time when most other reformers and philanthropists routinely established committees of trustees to oversee the proper use of the charitable funds they collected, Barnardo insisted on retaining exclusive control over the finances and direction of his institutions.
By the spring of 1877, Barnardo confronted a personal debacle that threatened to undo a decade of patient labors among the poor. Donations to his institutions dropped precipitously amidst vicious rumors impugning his integrity and probity. “Our night of trouble and tears, we feel certain, must soon be over,” Barnardo consoled himself in June. “The light will surely penetrate and dispel the mists and shadows.”8 Throughout the summer months of 1877, a panel of three distinguished arbitrators, as well as Britain’s larger philanthropic and Christian communities, scrutinized every aspect of his public and private life. The arbitration hearing had all the ingredients of a story that would have appealed deeply to Barnardo’s theatrical imagination had he not been cast in the leading role in the unfolding drama. Scores of witnesses, rich and poor alike, paraded through the arbitration chamber at the Institution of Surveyors, Great George Street, Westminster, to testify for and against Barnardo. He stood accused of a potent and sensational mix of charges which, if proved true, would necessarily have destroyed his good name and ended his work. These included misappropriating funds to enrich himself; physically abusing the children he rescued from the streets by cruel punishment and inadequate attention to their religious, dietary, and medical needs; falsely assuming the title of Doctor without completing his qualifying examinations; and engaging in immoral relations with a prostitute. Finally, Barnardo was charged with producing and distributing falsified photographs of his ragged children that purported to show them exactly as he found them but actually depicted them in artificially staged poses. Anxieties about photographic falsification were compounded by the nature of the images themselves, which some considered indecent and sexually provocative in displaying the bare limbs and bodies of the children through their ripped and torn garments.9
