Slumming

by Koven, Seth

  Beginning in December 1876, Barnardo issued a leaflet, attached to every packet of photographs he sold, that explained his “objects in photographing boys and girls.” Photographs, he argued, served as instruments of memory, surveillance, and advertising.68 He used before-and-after photographs, approximating cartes de visites in appearance, to demonstrate the transformative effects of his benevolence on children. These contrasting portraits mirrored the framework of evangelical conversion narratives whose power depended upon the stark contrast between an initial condition of abject sin and depravity and the joys of salvation in Jesus.69

  Barnardo produced tens of thousands of these “contrasting” portraits of children which he sold or gave away to men, women, and children across the social spectrum (figure 2.6). He anticipated that his photographic “contrasts” would evoke different responses among the rich and poor. The rich, he hoped, would make generous donations to assist the work. Among the poor, Barnardo used the cards to publicize his work and to encourage in them a desire for moral and physical elevation. For example, in his chapbook A City Waif: How I Fished for and Caught Her, he told the story of his pursuit of the nearly naked Irish Cockney girl Bridget, whose raggedness foreshadowed the likelihood that she would become a prostitute. She was represented as both an innocent object of benevolence and as the potential object of male erotic desire.70 Bridget had “no boots or stockings … no hat or bonnet covered the wild hair…. Her thin dress show[ed] great rents here and there.”71

  The climax of Barnardo’s story about Bridget’s reclamation was the moment when he held before her a cardboard photograph of a smiling well-dressed Barnardo girl hard at work.

  “Oh, my!” was the admiring exclamation that burst from Bridget’s lips. “Ain’t she smart.”

  Having allowed a few minutes for examination of the picture, I asked, “Wouldn’t you wish to be like her? Better, I should think, to be dressed in that way than to wear the things you have on,” pointing to her ragged dress.

  “I should think it wor,” she replied; “but I ain’t got such luck, you see.”

  “Nonsense,” I rejoined.72

  Bridget plays Galatea to Barnardo’s Pygmalion, not however, in order to become his beloved, but instead to become a servant in another man’s household.

  The lucrative illicit market in Barnardo’s photographs among the poor themselves suggests that they knew that photographs of ragged children were valuable commodities. In January 1877, for example, a street urchin in Leeds had been caught pretending to be a Barnardo collecting agent. He had already cajoled 60 shillings from a credulous public by selling Barnardo photographs.73 Some poor children also understood the economic benefits of making themselves appear as ragged as possible to gain sympathy and money from passers-by. One young boy, Stuttering Bob, manipulated his self-representation to conform to the ways in which he believed elites imagined and expected him to look. According to J.W.C. Fegan, who rescued Stuttering Bob from the street,

  FIGURE 2.6. Barnardo’s photographic “contrasts” purported to illustrate the ways in which the loving regime at his homes transformed children from dangerous and costly threats to society into productive, self-supporting workers of the future. Evidence that several of these before-and-after images had been taken on the day the child was admitted into the home called into question both the trustworthiness of photographs as documents of social reality and of Barnardo’s philanthropic methods and institutions. (Image courtesy of Barnardo’s Photographic Archive.)

  the hoardings at the time, in London, were placarded with wood-cuts of a crossing-sweeper, advertising a play (one of Dickens’ novels dramatised) called “Poor Jo.” Bob dressed himself up so as to exactly represent “Poor Jo,” and standing near the theatre as the audience came out with their feelings worked upon by “Poor Jo” on the stage, confronted them with a counterpart of the character, crouching down, shivering all over, and beseechingly whining, “Pl-pl-please to re-re-rember poo-poo-poor Jo.” Bob reaped a silver and copper harvest for a while.74

  The story of Stuttering Bob illustrates the way in which Dickens’s representation of a single ragged child circulated between visual, written, and spoken media. While Bob was a bona fide street urchin, he astutely masqueraded as the fictional Poor Jo, whom Dickens had modeled on the lives of real children such as Bob. Representation and reality are intertwined in an amusing but confusing circle of mutual imitation. At approximately the same time Stuttering Bob offered his street performances, Barnardo’s studio executed a “representative” photograph of a crouched, tattered boy entitled “Lost,” which clearly quoted O. G. Rejlander’s widely admired photograph entitled “Poor Jo.”75

  Rejlander was the most prominent and controversial exponent of photography as a fine art in mid-Victorian Britain.76 By the early 1860s he had executed many celebrated photographic studies of children costumed to look like ragged street waifs, and he had gained international fame when he exhibited his monumental photographic allegory, “The Two Ways of Life, or Hope in Repentance” in 1857. Closely resembling an immense neoclassical history painting, it was a composite photograph printed from over thirty negatives that included several nude and seminude figures. Anticipating Barnardo’s own arguments defending his posed photographs, Rejlander insisted that photographs and paintings had equal claims to be “truthful” and “real,” “both being but representative.”77 Many were not convinced. While “The Two Ways of Life” was “intended to teach a high moral lesson” about female virtue and vice, Photographic Notes observed that the Scottish Photographic Society had demonstrated lamentable prudery in refusing to admit the photograph to its exhibition. One critic exposed the hypocritical standards of delicacy imposed on contemporary visual representations: “Anything which bears with it the impress of antiquity, however lewd or indelicate, is idealized into classicism, whilst anything like an attempt to elucidate an idea in the present moral age, is at once condemned as indelicate.”78

  Barnardo’s photographic practices emphatically demonstrated that he was well aware of contemporary debate about the moral standards used to judge photographs and the confusion over whether they were objective documents of social reality or subjective works of art. This debate concerned not only questions about the audiences for and uses of photographs, but also the thornier issue of the authenticity of photographs as records of actual past events.79 For Barnardo, the debate posed a false dichotomy since both ways of understanding and using photography served his benevolent ends. He devised his own code to distinguish between photographs that purported to depict a particular individual with documentary fidelity and “artistic” photographs that were “representative” or “typical” of entire classes of people. Photographs identifying specific people were similar to the case histories assembled by COS investigators (and Barnardo’s own staff) about each applicant. They were attached to a case file as a visual record of the child’s physical appearance at the time of admission. These identification portraits were accompanied by the subject’s real initials.80

  “Typical” or “representative” photographs closely resembled evangelical “true narratives” in that they represented higher truths transcending the details of any individual case. Typical photographs were accompanied not by the initials of a person, but by captions or titles such as “Rescue the Perishing” or “A Night’s Catch” in order to suggest their function as visual parables. The staging of the images along with accompanying captions highlighted their similarity to nonphotographic forms of art, especially paintings, sketches, and engravings. As such, Barnardo believed that his “typical” photographs should be judged by the prevailing standards of truthfulness expected of works of art including social realist paintings and literature.81

  To buttress his case, he pointed to the work of several well-known contemporaries, including the widely praised canvasses of the Welsh painter Bernard Samuel Marks.82 Marks extolled the effectiveness of Barnardo’s rescue work in his painting “100,000 Neglected and Destitute Children i
n London,” shown in the Royal Academy in 1873. The painting, which consisted of contrasting portraits of Barnardo boys “before and after rescue training,” was hailed by the critic for the Art Journal as a “remarkable memorandum” of Barnardo’s “wholesome treatment” of ragged children.83 Other social realist painters, foremost among them W. P. Frith, were also widely praised for their efforts to draw attention to the plight of poor children. Frith felt no need to conceal the fact that he hired street children as models and then ripped and arranged their clothing to achieve the artistic effect he sought.84 Placed within this context, it is easy to sympathize with Barnardo’s perplexity about the public furor unleashed by the way he occasionally dressed and undressed his ragged child models before photographing them. Barnardo believed that his “typical” photos, like other works of art, revealed essential truths about ragged children and their lives, if not always their literal conditions.

  Barnardo’s conception of the illustrative uses of photography approximated those of Charles Darwin, the leading man of science in Victorian Britain. In the early 1870s, Darwin had hoped to harness the supposedly objective, authenticating powers of photography to support his scientific theories. He built on a tradition as old as photography itself of using photography to serve the pursuit of scientific truth. William Henry Fox Talbot, Britain’s preeminent pioneer of photography in the 1830s, had created many of his first images of plant leaves to serve as specimens for scientific study. At the same time, Darwin knew well that photographs could easily be manipulated to tell stories that were not quite as truthful as they appeared. In illustrating his 1872 study The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin collaborated with none other than Oscar Gustave Rejlander, the acknowledged master of manipulating photographs to serve the needs of art, not science. The images Rejlander created for Darwin were clearly posed—in no sense were they the records of spontaneous expressions of emotion they purported to be. At least one was a photograph of an engraving drawn from a photograph to which important details had been added for effect. Darwin did not disclose these facts but instead labeled the image simply as a photograph—which, in a literal sense, it was. Darwin’s illustrations were intended to reinforce the truthfulness of his hypotheses and to make his book more attractive and persuasive to readers; they were not supposed to memorialize particular past moments that actually had occurred. Understood in this way, Darwin’s photographic practices were in harmony with Barnardo’s. Both played upon viewers’ assumptions that photographs presented objective facts while exploiting the possibilities of using photographs as “artistic fictions.”85 In other words, the boundaries between photography as science and as art, as a record of objective reality and its subjective manipulation, were far from clear in the 1870s. Debates about the proper and improper uses of photography closely mirrored struggles among charity workers, such as Barnardo and the COS, who sought to strike a balance between the conflicting demands of science and sentiment in the practice of philanthropy.

  Rumors about sexual misconduct at Barnardo’s institutions may well have encouraged some of his critics to suspect that his images of children were not only deceitful but indecent. Barnardo’s public was well aware of the existence of a large underground market in pornographic photos of women and children. Invoking the 1857 Obscene Publications Act, the police conducted several well-publicized raids in the 1860s and ’70s that yielded tens of thousands of obscene books, pamphlets, and photographs.86

  Barnardo’s photographs and his graphic images intentionally underscored the raggedness of the children’s clothing (figure 2.7). Raggedness—ripped and torn clothing which exposed the bodies and extremities of children—was not only an effective visual marker of poverty but could also be a disturbingly erotic sign. C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), perhaps the foremost photographer of children in Victorian Britain and, like Barnardo, an expert in photographic masquerades, understood well the erotic power of the not-quite naked child and photographed Alice Liddell in artfully torn rags in 1858.87 As Mario Perniola has argued, “[I]n the figurative arts, eroticism appears as a relationship between clothing and nudity. Therefore it is conditional on the possibility of movement—transit—from one state to the other.”88 Barnardo’s literary and visual representations of poor children dramatized several interdependent movements from “one state to another.” They linked the erotic transit from naked to clothed, implicit in raggedness, to the physical and spiritual movement between indecency and decency, damnation and salvation, lost and found, homeless and domesticated.89

  FIGURE 2.7. The words “Drawn From Life” in the upper left corner emphasized that the image documented the physical appearance of real children whom Barnardo had rescued. Barnardo’s graphic images were even more effective than his photographs in exploiting the visual iconography linking ragged clothing, spiked hair, and bare feet with extreme poverty and endangered childhood. Graphic images, unlike photographs, could also mobilize the visual language of Victorian physiognomy, which equated the facial features of the poor with those of primitive races. (“Something Attempted, Something Done!” 1890.)

  Two photographs examined during the arbitration offer compelling examples of the mingling of philanthropic and erotic rhetorics in Barnardo’s language of virtue. Whether the images themselves are indecent is less important for the argument I propose than the apparent willingness of some to believe that they were. What makes an image “indecent” or “pornographic” is determined less by what is contained within its frame than in the historical circumstances of its creation and reception and the meanings that others found in it. Barnardo adorned the cover of his 1875 report, Rescue the Perishing, with a photograph of a boy named Samuel Reed. This photograph was the basis for the charge that “Dr. Barnardo makes a practice of stripping children of their proper clothing, cutting their clothes, and dressing them in rags, for the purpose of getting up fictitious and deceptive photographs.”90 Reed, a seaman on board the ship Boscowen in 1877, was asked to recall the events surrounding his admission to the home six years earlier. “The morning after I entered the Home I was taken by a boy named Brown to have my photograph taken.” Barnardo led “[me] to an upper room, where he took out his pen-knife and tore my clothes to pieces. After he had disfigured me, I was then laid on the floor and my photograph was taken.”91 Soon thereafter, Reed was dressed in a new uniform, placed in a hammock, forced by Dr. Barnardo to affect an “unnatural” smile, and photographed to complete the pair of contrasting images.92 Reed’s testimony and his examination by Reynolds’s lawyer, St. John Wontner, emphasized his status as the passive object of Barnardo’s violent manipulations. Reed’s coerced “smile” functions as an insidious sign that Barnardo’s, not his own, desires have been gratified.

  Wontner used even more explicitly charged language in his examination of Barnardo’s photographer, Mr. Barnes. His questions to Barnes—“How was Reed deranged? How was he [Reed] altered?”—were suggestively ambiguous. On the literal level, Wontner wanted to know whether Reed’s clothing had been changed, but the phrasing of the question reinforced Reynolds’s published contention that the experience of being photographed by Barnardo had a “tendency to destroy the better feelings of the children”—to “alter” them in undesirable ways.93 Wontner’s interrogation strove to produce an impression of Reed as Barnardo’s unwilling and violated child model.

  Upon his admission to the home, Reed’s clothes were torn and his limbs exposed for the benefit of the camera. Several years later, according to a published affidavit submitted to George Reynolds by John Hancorne, another employee dismissed for “gross impropriety,” the boy had been forcibly stripped and flogged before the staff and other boys. Reynolds published Hancorne’s account to expose and denounce Barnardo’s scandalous abuse of his charges, but his text verges on reproducing the disturbing excitations of contemporary flagellant pornography.94 It emphasizes the consequences of the inequality in power between the helpless boy, denied the right to speak in his own defense, and the
Governor, Mr. Fielder, whom Reed addresses deferentially, but to no avail, with the phrase “Please, Sir.”

  Mr. Fielder, the Governor of the Home, summoned all the masters up to the schoolroom during school-hours. He then offered a long prayer, which was followed by a lecture, after which he called Reed to the front. He came.

  Fielder.—“Reed, take off your clothes.”

  Read [sic].—“Allow me one word, please Sir.”

  Fielder.—“Not a word. Take off your clothes.”

  Reed.—“Please, Sir, I should like to say one word first.”

  Fielder, addressing those who stood by.—“Take his clothes off.”

  The lad was seized by the throat, when a terrible scene ensued. After a time the lad was laid on his back insensible.

  This I declare to be true. I was an eye-witness to the whole of what is stated above.

  Signed, John Hancorne, 34, Bower-street, Commercial-road, London.95