by Koven, Seth
CONCLUSION
The aftermath of the Barnardo arbitration left a deep mark on each of the individuals, organizations, and movements involved in it and raised important issues about competing notions of truth, social welfare, and representation. The COS was profoundly affected by the avalanche of criticisms it received for its unsuccessful and vindictive pursuit of Barnardo.117 Lloyd’s Weekly pugnaciously suggested that the time had come for a “searching investigation of the COS” whose “unfeeling inquisitions” “tortured” poor folks and “closed the giver’s hand to many a deserving human creature.”118 The COS’s mishandling of the arbitration dashed its hope that Parliament would grant it exclusive legal control over the organization of charity and allow it to regulate the relationship between the state and private charity.119 The president of the COS chose to resign (though not because anyone held him personally responsible for the Barnardo fiasco), and his handpicked organising secretary, who had orchestrated the COS’s campaign against Barnardo, was ousted in a series of extraordinary COS council meetings.120
Evangelical charity, including Barnardo’s ambitious ventures, continued to flourish in the 1880s to an extent inadequately recognized by historians blinkered by their search for the secular origins of the twentieth-century welfare state. As a result of the arbitration, Barnardo claimed he would not take any more “representative” photographs of his children.121 He did continue to amass his archive of admission photographs which, according to John Tagg, marked an important moment in the harnessing of photography as a tool of surveillance of the poor in the nineteenth century.122 This analysis leads toward rather different, though not contradictory, conclusions. Just as the COS was determined to destroy Barnardo, or at least contain the scope of his philanthropic methods, so, too, the arbitration and the response of the press revealed deep concern to discipline and regulate the “legitimate”—in terms of morality, sexuality, and veracity—uses of photography as an emerging technology to represent the poor.
Reformers from the late-18th century onward had recognized the power of images of poor children to stir the sympathies of the public and stimulate generous donations to humanitarian causes.123 Barnardo worked within and transformed the rich legacy of representations of ragged children he inherited: the forlorn but prophetic waifs of Dickens’s novels and the spirited shoeblacks of Lord Shaftesbury’s famous brigades. Barnardo’s “representative” photographs, sketches, and narratives were all part of his apparatus to arouse public sympathy and activity on behalf of street children.
If arousal is the essence of eros, it also was essential to the sympathy Barnardo strove to stimulate with his daring philanthropic appeals. The tension between sexual innocence and sexual experience lay at the heart of the urgent sympathy he evoked in his images of ragged girls. Anticipating W. T. Stead’s Maiden Tribute tactics of the mid-1880s,124 Barnardo conveyed a keen sense of the imminent sexual dangers awaiting what he called “the not yet fallen” ragged street girls he saved.125 By representing them as sexually vulnerable and available, he attempted to reproduce for his audiences the dangers awaiting ragged girls without incriminating himself as a purveyor of such images. On the one hand, he needed to show his audience that poor girls were sexual commodities within the predatory economy of prostitution. By so doing, he forced his contemporaries to see female children as sexual beings, albeit not by choice but rather as victims of adult male lust.126 On the other hand, Barnardo conjured up images of ragged girls as objects of male sexual desire in order to censure and condemn such desires as un-Christian and exploitative and redirect them toward benevolent ends (figures 2.9a,b).
What part, if any, sexuality played in the sympathy Barnardo excited in his representations of ragged boys was neither explicit nor intentional. Barnardo and most other child welfare advocates claimed that boys schooled on the streets would become criminals unless they were subjected to rigorous but loving institutional discipline. Despite the existence of a lucrative “rough trade” in boy prostitutes and soldiers in Victorian London, Barnardo never acknowledged that life on the streets posed sexual dangers for boys as well as girls. However, rumors about sexual misconduct in Barnardo’s boys’ home and the character of the questions posed by St. John Wontner to Barnardo’s photographic staff darkly hinted that his photographs of ragged boys were evidence of “unnatural” passions and behaviors.127
FIGURE 2.9. Victorian elites viewed poor children as dangerous threats to the social order and also simultaneously as sentimental objects of unspoiled and innocent humanity. In marked contrast to Barnardo’s use of ragged clothes and exposed limbs to suggest sexual danger, Mrs. H. M. Stanley (Dorothy Tennant), wife of the famed explorer, highlighted the ways in which the joys of childhood were undiminished by poverty. Most of the images she included in her book London Street Arabs (1890) showed children at play (figure 2.9b) or with their mothers or enjoying the attentions of a “Lady Bountiful” (figure 2.9a).
Just as the photographs incited and contained their sexual message, so, too, they criticized and took advantage of the relationship of the state and the free market to ragged children and their welfare. The images graphically demonstrated the inadequacy of the free market to satisfy the minimal needs of children and the state’s refusal to remedy this shocking neglect. To protect ragged children from selling their bodies on the streets of London, Barnardo distributed and sold images of them and used these images as marketing tools. In this way, he foreshadowed the rise of philanthropy as big business and the philanthropist as entrepreneur. Barnardo’s use of his photographs collapsed the distinction between morality and marketing. The images served as advertisements for his work and as condensed visual parables about imperiled childhood innocence. If, as Viviana Zelizer has argued, Victorian children became increasingly “priceless,” Barnardo nonetheless understood how to use their images to “make capital” for his philanthropic enterprises.128
In the decades following the arbitration, ragged children and representations of them proved even more formidable adversaries for the COS than did Barnardo himself. Time and again, the COS opposed private and public schemes to provide goods and services for poor children on the grounds that such benevolence undermined parental responsibility. Aware of its growing isolation and unpopularity, the COS denounced “indiscriminate” relief for children in ever more strident tones by the turn of the century. In vain it opposed those landmark state-welfare measures on behalf of poor children—the medical inspection of school children and the feeding of necessitous school children—which proved the entering wedge for so much interventionist social welfare legislation during the Edwardian years.
The leaders of the COS and other champions of liberal economic and social theories about citizenship and the state were singularly illequipped to respond to their critics who contended that because children were not autonomous, rational citizens, they could not be held responsible for their poverty. Children were by definition dependent, not independent; lacking the capacity to make free choices, they necessarily operated within a framework of adult compulsion. Barnardo’s photographic images of ragged children called attention to children’s blameless dependence in order to condemn the workings of the poor law and galvanize the sympathy of adults. But as his enemies during the arbitration tried to prove, his photographs also unwittingly bore witness to the extent to which his child models were subject to the coercive authority of even those who, like Barnardo, claimed to act in their best interests. In this way, Barnardo’s “artistic fictions” are ambivalent monuments both to the ubiquity of ragged children in the urban landscape and their centrality in the Victorian moral imagination. The power of images of ragged children in promoting private benevolence and public welfare policies paradoxically relied upon the utter powerlessness of street children themselves to make claims on the state and civil society. Barnardo’s very success in making visual images of his ragged children such unforgettable markers of poverty undercut the dynamic of benevolent transformation at the very heart of
his mission. The Barnardo boy or girl became fixed in the British cultural imagination as a synonym for the ragged child, trapped forever in the spectacular and iconic poverty of torn clothes, bare feet, and unkempt hair. While his plaintive “before” pictures leave an indelible mental imprint, the “after” images of neatly clad children engaged in industrious labor are easily forgotten.
Images of ragged children have continued to play an important role in the way we think about poverty in the century since Barnardo’s death. When I open up a magazine and confront the dirty face and tattered clothes of a child appealing to me to “save” her or him by contributing a few dollars (or pounds) each month, I cannot help but recall the words of the boy Reed and the beadle Fitzgerald and see the haunting images of the Williams children and Joseph Merrick. We are not supposed to know that these images have a long and problematic history. If we did, we would surely understand that such philanthropic schemes may have done good work for tens of thousands of individual children but have done little to address the deeper structural problems that produce new generations of child waifs who, like Barnardo’s children, will be photographed in their pathetic rags. Worse yet, some may even suspect that giving money to Barnardo’s over the years has made it just a bit easier for generations of compassionate men and women to avoid demanding more fundamental changes in our approach to childhood poverty.129
Just as this chapter situates Dr. Barnardo’s “artistic fictions” at the confluence of several historical and discursive streams in nineteenth-century culture and society, we can detect its visual traces and hear echoes of its protagonists’ voices in the ongoing work of Barnardo’s today and in the history of one of the most notable and innovative child welfare organizations founded in the twentieth century: Save the Children. Comparing the current discursive and photographic practices of these two justly celebrated private charities throws into sharp relief the urgency of the questions raised—but not resolved—by the 1877 arbitration.
In 1994 Barnardo’s launched its Streets and Lanes Project with the explicit aim of protecting girls and young women abused through prostitution. Barnardo’s sought to provide services for victims of sexual abuse while shifting the discursive terrain in which debates about sexual abuse were and are embedded. As Carole Howlett, deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police explains, “we no longer talk about ‘child prostitutes, pimps and punters.’ … Instead we say children abused through prostitution, abusing adults and child-sex offenders.” Thanks to Barnardo’s efforts, the police “no longer view [children] as young criminals but rather as victims of sexual abuse and thus in need of protection.”130 Barnardo’s has unmistakably shed the framework of fallenness and criminality that were so integral to its Victorian founder’s conception of the moral status of the children he rescued. In its place, Barnardo’s has embraced a philosophy which seeks to ensure that the voices of victims are heard and their needs made paramount.
If Barnardo’s approach to child poverty has been transformed almost beyond recognition over the past 130 years, its techniques for calling attention to the plight of neglected children and to itself have not. In the year 2000, Barnardo’s embarked upon a campaign to promote its programs to protect the child victims of homelessness by depicting a baby, sitting in its own feces, injecting heroin. Buoyed by the publicity generated by this image (much of it highly critical), Barnardo’s ventured into even more provocative and dangerous territory in 2002 with its multimedia Stolen Childhood campaign. The photographic images accompanying this campaign, like those produced by Dr. Barnardo himself in the 1870s, are unabashedly confrontational. Shot in a starkly documentaryrealist idiom, they position us as voyeurs, witnesses to scenes of child sexual abuse as they are about to unfold. These images intentionally mimic the visual conventions of kiddie porn widely available on the Internet, even as the accompanying written texts allow us to hear abused children explain their entrapment in sexual slavery through Internet chat rooms and pornographic photographs of them sold over the Internet. The power of these images resides partly in their refusal to show us sex acts (which we would register as pornography) and partly in the way they cause us to imagine these sex acts for ourselves. The tawdry banality of the settings—a urinal in a public men’s room, a sparely furnished bedroom—only highlight the grotesque monstrosity of the half-visible, partially unclothed but anonymous adult, male, sex abusers, one of whom is conspicuously wearing his wedding ring (figure 2.10b).
Perhaps what is most shocking about these images is the way in which they intentionally undermine their own claims to be wholly faithful to reality: the face of each of the child victims has been digitally aged, their right to be children literally stolen from them. In other words, Barnardo’s has resurrected its founder’s conviction that the deepest truths about society’s most vulnerable members can be represented most powerfully through “artistic fictions” which compel viewers simultaneously to acknowledge and to take action against child abuse. And like Dr. Barnardo himself, the leaders of Barnardo’s today have chosen to exploit the possibilities of new technologies of the “real” to capture the public’s attention and financial support. “We must ensure that our relatively small budget overachieves by cutting through the media clutter,” explains Barnardo’s employee Rachel Knott. “The adverts need to grab attention.”131 As part of its effort to outlaw the sexual commodification of real children’s bodies, Barnardo’s continues to raise money by producing eroticized—and falsified—images of them132 (figures 2.10a,b).
In the past two decades, the approach of Save the Children to both its own history and to its current photographic policies has diverged dramatically from Barnardo’s. Save the Children was founded in the immediate aftermath of World War I, when a group of highly educated women and men decided to apply their deep knowledge of childhood poverty in England to the problems facing children worldwide. Led by Eglantyne Jebb, a graduate of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, the founders of Save the Children very quickly adopted sensational and innovative techniques reminiscent of Barnardo’s to promote the fledgling agency and its causes. One of its leaders, Ernest Hamilton, purchased double-column advertising space in major newspapers which he filled with “crude ‘line’ drawings of agonised, screaming women clutching to their breasts ghastly skeletons of children whom the British public were urged to save from otherwise certain death.” By 1921, Save the Children decided to harness not only photography but also film to serve its philanthropic needs and produced riveting visual images of child victims of famine in Bolshevik Russia.133 For the next six decades, Save the Children regularly circulated images of scantily clad and undernourished people, especially girls and women of color, to support its growing international network of benevolence.
Not until the late 1980s did Save the Children self-critically reckon with the ethical implications of its use of images of the poor and vulnerable. Do photographic subjects have rights and if so, what are they? How can depictions of the poor acknowledge their dignity and humanity? What are the boundaries between sympathy and sexuality, truth and fiction in photographs of poor children? The Save the Children Fund Image Guidelines attempted to answer these questions by making clear “the connection between images and how they influence the way people are perceived and treated … [by] show[ing] the link between images, principles and practice, and attitudes to racial, cultural, and sexual differences.” The ten guidelines it offers, accompanied by examples of “good” and “bad” photographic practices drawn from its own archives, emphasize the dignity of the poor, their ability to act for themselves, the diverse forms and causes of poverty, and the essentially collaborative character of all efforts to assist those in need. Within this self-conscious ethical framework, sensationalism, even harnessed to serve a worthy cause, is incompatible with human dignity (figure 2.11). Perhaps most importantly, at least from my perspective, the guidelines do not aspire to be the final word on the subject: “since language and imagery are living and evolving all the time, it is hoped t
hat the guidelines will encourage healthy debate.”134
FIGURE 2.10. Barnardo’s most recent campaign against childhood sexual abuse in 2002, like its predecessors in the nineteenth century, has generated tremendous controversy and also achieved impressive results. The faces of the children have been digitally aged to underscore that their rights to be children have been “stolen” from them by sexually exploitative adults. (Photographs from Barnardo’s Stolen Childhood Campaign, 2002. Courtesy of Barnardo’s.)
This chapter has sought to recapture at least some of the “healthy debate” stirred up by Barnardo’s rescue work in Victorian East London. Contemporaries found in Barnardo and his institutions an unsettling convergence of roles that they wanted to believe were mutually exclusive. Barnardo and his staff were agents of child rescue and accused of child abuse. They advocated social purity in public and were rumored to engage in gross sexual misconduct in private. With good reason, the public wanted to know which of these characterizations was the truth.
