by Koven, Seth
British women journalists tried to balance their desire to glamorize the dangers of their profession, so crucial to their commercial success, with an equally urgent need to be seen as feminine women.54 Arguably the most powerful impressario of New Journalism in London, William T. Stead insisted that the “chief foe that women have to contend with in journalism is their own conventionality.” But he also insisted that “if a girl means to be a journalist she ought to be a journalist out and out, and not try to be a journalist up to nine o’clock and Miss Nancy after nine.” He believed that “no editor in his senses wants either mannish women or womanish men on his staff.”55 Women journalists (and men as well), Stead insisted, had to conform to rigid sexual and gender norms while simultaneously casting off their own conventionality. Throughout her years in London, Banks strove to achieve this elusive balance between being a conventional woman and an unconventional journalist. Perhaps this explains why Stead himself was so sympathetic to her and offered her hospitality in his country home.56 Subjected to so much criticism by English women journalists for her “horrible,” “unwomanly,” and “demoralizing” antics, Banks seemed to believe in the 1890s that the only way she could secure her status as a “womanly woman” was by belittling advanced women or suffragists as unwomanly.57
The controversies surrounding Banks’s Campaigns of Curiosity and the emergence of the woman journalist suggest that the press not only provided a space to debate relations between the sexes and the acceptable boundaries of male and female behavior but also actively promoted such controversies to enhance its own cultural, political, and economic authority.58 Readers and journalists alike initiated endless circles of references to each other’s published views and by so doing created a world in print that transformed the terms in which men and women came to know themselves. This was the world of journalism in late Victorian London—with its limitations and opportunities—into which Banks entered and by which we can make sense of her contributions to it.
AN “AMERICAN GIRL” IMPERSONATING LONDON’S LABORING WOMEN
Throughout her life, Banks used disguises to explore not only her own identity as a woman but larger issues about gender, class, and nationality in England and America. While these themes are the explicit subject of her last novel, School for John and Mary (1924), and second autobiography, The Remaking of an American (1928), they permeate all her writings and significantly shaped how others responded to her. Banks was so successful and controversial—the two were clearly connected in her case—because her incognitos called into question what it meant to be rich and poor, a woman and a journalist, an English Lady and an American Girl. So far, I have located Banks’s struggles to understand herself as a womanly woman and as journalist within fin-de-siècle discussions about women’s relationship to public life and their entry into the profession of journalism. In this section, I will shift attention to several other debates to which Banks contributed: the legitimate (and illegitimate) uses of cross-class incognitos by women reporters and slum explorers; the status of the home as the cradle of social values and as a site of class conflict between mistresses and their maids; investigations conducted by female sociologists, political activists, and journalists into women’s labor in the metropolis; and, finally, the American Girl and the English Lady as distinct national types.
Gender and Domesticity in Banks’s Maidservant Masquerade
The same penchant for self-invention that impelled Banks to be photographed in costumes and to write two autobiographies sustained her work as an investigative journalist.59 To understand the lives of working girls, she left the ostensibly detached and safe position of observer to share their work with them. “You can only understand the lives they [the poor] lead by becoming one of them,” she explained to Marion Leslie in 1894, the interviewer sent by Young Woman to introduce the “real” Elizabeth Banks to girl readers in London.60 Banks had become one of them the year before with the publication of her “Cap and Apron” series in the Weekly Sun from October to December 1893. She passed herself off as a household servant and offered an insider’s perspective on that inexhaustible topic of conversation among the well-to-do: the servant problem. She set out to discover why the spirited but threadbare girls and young women she had met during a day of slumming in south London expressed universal contempt for domestic service. Was domestic service compatible with English love of liberty? Banks wondered.
Banks was not the first educated, respectable woman in London to don the clothes of poverty and see for herself how the other half lived.61 There were several precedents in late-Victorian Anglo-America upon which she might have drawn. The American journalist, Annie Wakeman had launched her career in London in 1883 by writing “some clever articles on the seamy side of East End working, and other class life.”62 In the September 1888 issue of the Nineteenth Century, Beatrice Potter published her “Pages of a Workgirl’s Diary,” a vivid record of her experiences masquerading as a trouser fitter and Jewess in a sweated workshop in East London. The daughter of a wealthy capitalist, Potter was closely connected by ties of kinship and friendship to many of the leading intellectuals, social reformers, and politicians of the day. Hired by her cousin Charles Booth to assist him in researching and writing the first volume of his monumental Life and Labour of the People in London, she decided to supplement her statistical knowledge about Jewish sweated labor with first-hand impressions. Booth himself had indulged in similar incognito fact-finding and had even let a workman’s flat in East London as his base of operations for his sociological inquiries. Unlike the more rigorously scientific account of labor practices in the East End tailoring trade that she had published one month earlier in the same periodical, Potter’s essay about her incognito slumming highlighted the humanity of the workgirls and their overseer. Just as Potter ultimately preferred social scientific analysis to social work, so, too, she later dismissed her incognito investigations as a “lark.” Such “romantic adventures … would have been of no value at all,” Potter (who was now Mrs. Sidney Webb) told Sarah Tooley, the journalist from Young Woman sent to interview her, “without the more solid work of investigation.”63 But at the time Potter disguised herself, the distinctions between “romance” and the “solid work of investigation” were far from settled in her own mind. “For Webb,” Deborah Nord has argued convincingly, “the project of disguise was more than sound methodology; it was also a form of psychological experiment. Through it she could reconstruct her relationship to the working class and examine her own class identity. She could also express parts of her personality that customarily lay dormant or were hidden.”64
Banks may have been familiar with Potter’s exploits,65 but it is much more likely that she modeled herself after the outrageous journalistic campaigns undertaken by female reporters in New York in the 1880s and ’90s—the so called stunt girls and sob sisters. Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochrane) was an international celebrity who followed up her masquerade as madwoman confined to Blackwell Island Insane Asylum (1887) by pretending to be an unwed mother in search of a baby farmer. So great was her renown that various women successfully masqueraded as Bly herself in swindling a gullible public desperate to know the “real” woman behind her many masks. Following the publication of Bly’s articles in the World, other young women—including Viola Roseboro, Fannie Merrill, and, somewhat later, Nell Nelson—began to publish stories detailing their own horrible masquerades.66 Banks was quick to exploit the gap between the very different conditions prevailing in London and New York for women journalists and to serve as a well-paid intermediary between them. “In England women journalists are something of an experiment,” she observed. “In the United States they are a firmly established institution” whose copy was the “best, cleverest and most thorough.” She explained the disparity in female journalists’ status in terms of the differing conceptions of womanliness prevailing on either side of the Atlantic, in particular American women’s “longing to be in the world of men, to become part and parcel of the great bustle
of our large cities.”67
If Banks’s news stories in London seem staid compared to the sensational fare standard in New York by the early 1890s, we need to remember that English readers judged her Campaigns of Curiosity in relation to their own attitudes about money and philanthropy and according to the conventions of men’s and women’s incognito social investigation they knew best. The Pall Mall Gazette’s Autolycus unfavorably compared Banks not to American journalists such as Nellie Bly, but rather to James Greenwood and Beatrice Potter. Nor was she the only one to make this comparison. Several readers of Banks’s first major success as a costumed chronicler of laboring life, her “Cap and Apron” series, likened her articles to those published by the Amateur Casual (James Greenwood) in the Pall Mall Gazette in January 1866. According to a sympathetic reviewer for the Ladies Pictorial, Banks had finally opened up for English women the style of journalism pioneered by Greenwood as an “amateur casual.”68
How did Banks’s journalistic practices compare to those of the original amateur casual, James Greenwood, and other leading undercover reporters? Greenwood was a man with a carefully crafted persona as a dandaical rake who enjoyed the privileges of walking the city streets in pursuit of its visual pleasures and erotic sensations. In the 1860s and ’70s, only prostitutes had similar freedoms to roam the streets, and they did so as fetishized objects of male lust, not as seekers after their own pleasures. Male journalists like Greenwood, G. R. Sims and W. T. Stead shocked readers by making them witnesses to the scenes of depravity that were described in their articles. While Greenwood purportedly stumbled into a sodomitical fraternity of tramps, Sims used disguise to penetrate one-room slum tenements where, he suggested darkly, incest flourished. Stead played the part of a “bully” (pimp) so well in acquiring a young virgin to sell into white slavery that he was sentenced to jail for violating the very laws he sought to reform.
Banks’s incognito investigations, by contrast, revealed no appalling sexual or social abuses demanding reform.69 The master’s seduction of the female servant may have been the foundational plot of the novel as a literary genre and an ubiquitous and disastrous fact of life for tens of thousands of Victorian laboring women. However, no hint of this social evil made its way into Banks’s witty “Cap and Apron” series, which launched her rapid ascent in London’s journalistic marketplace in 1893. Men, sex, and titillation are conspicuously absent. Why? I suspect that Banks believed that discussing sex and putting herself in sexual danger were incompatible with the delicate balance she sought to maintain between her fairly conservative vision of womanliness, the gender ambiguities of the vocation of the female journalist, and her desire for fame and fortune. Banks rightly recognized that the mainstream commercial press and its readers—her targeted audience—would not have tolerated a young, unmarried female journalist penetrating the metropolis’s sexual secrets.
In place of sex, Banks’s “Cap and Apron” series probed the dynamics of class and gender. Banks offered readers a mostly female world beset by petty squabbles and misunderstandings between mistresses and their servants and among servants. The first unsuspecting home that Banks infiltrated provided abundant evidence of the degrading conditions servants endured. The physical demands of carrying buckets full of hot soapy water up steep flights of stairs were incompatible with womanliness, Banks insisted. The sheer multitude of tasks and hours of labor were entirely unreasonable; servants were subjected to the vagaries of their mistresses’ schedules, which often required them to stay up late into the night while awakening early the next morning to begin their daily chores. Servants were denied the comforts of a wholesome meal and a few hours of privacy. Such revelations briefly provoked the gratitude of servants across the metropolis and the wrath of their mistresses, but Banks did not bask long in the role of champion of the oppressed. After quitting her first position as a housemaid, she began to record her experiences working in a much more benevolent household. In the second half of her “Cap and Apron” series, she detailed the way servants shirked their assigned duties and took advantage of their mistresses’ generosity to line their own pockets or fill their stomachs with extra portions of food and drink. Far from leading servants to a promised land of fair pay for fair labor, Banks now appeared to have betrayed the trust of her fellow workers. Banks’s ostensible reversal of her sympathies on the servant question invited readers to think less about social questions and more about Banks herself as an embodiment of them.
Apparently, the educated and able women members of the Pioneer Club in London believed that Banks’s two weeks disguised as a housemaid made her an expert on the subject and invited her to address them on the servant problem. They were also curious to discover what had motivated her sensational journalism. Banks wrote at least three different accounts of her reception by the Pioneer women. The first appeared in the preface to her book Campaigns of Curiosity, a collection of previously published newspaper and magazine articles describing her incognito investigations. Perhaps hoping to win some favorable reviews, she thanked “the women journalists of London, … especially … the members of the Pioneer and Writers’ Clubs” for their kindly feelings towards her.”70 However, only a few weeks later, she confided to an interviewer that “addressing the Pioneer Club” took more out of her than any of her campaigns. The prospect of speaking to the clubwomen was so daunting that “when I got to my feet I was so weak that I should have dropped if the President had not supported me. I am not an ‘advanced woman,’ you know.” In this ingenious and compact version of the encounter, Banks presents herself as a helpless young girl and raises the possibility that at least some members of her audience were members of that fearful species of humanity, “advanced women.”71
In her Autobiography, published in 1902, Banks assumed the privilege of dramatic license by recalling—or inventing—a lengthy dialogue between herself and a Pioneer Club member, a woman writer, to explain the events of that memorable evening. The conversation hinges on the opposition between hypocrisy and honesty, self-interest and altruism, the pursuit of money and the pursuit of social good.
At that meeting a woman writer came over to me and said:—
“Now, tell me exactly, what was your aim and object—your serious one, I mean,—in going out to service and writing about it? It is a question we are all asking.”
“I did it for copy,” I answered; “to earn my living, you know. I knew it was a subject that would interest everybody.”
I shall never forget the shocked expression on that woman’s face nor fail to remember her exclamation of surprise and disgust, as she replied:—
“Copy! You mean to confess you had no philanthropic aim, that you did it for mercenary reasons, merely to earn your living?”
“Yes,” I returned, looking her squarely in the face, “I’m not a hypocrite and won’t pose as a reformer.”
“Oh! I really never thought any journalist would sink to such a level, or make such a confession, even if it were true! I must say I have never written anything except with the object of benefiting somebody by it.”
“Perhaps you have an income aside from your writing, which I have not,” I answered.” (95–96)
The indignant rhetoric that Banks attributed to her interlocutor suggests that more was at stake in this conversation than merely Banks’s reputation as a journalist. From that evening onward, Banks claimed that some looked upon her “as a sort of journalistic pariah, outcast from the circles of the truly good and worthy female writers for the press.”72 Issues of class, gender, and national identity simmer powerfully just below the surface of this exchange. Banks positioned herself outside the middle-class comfort of an English lady by underscoring that she had no income other than what she earned through her writing. She insisted upon conceptualizing herself as a woman worker—much like the subjects of her investigations. At the same time, English lady journalists placed her outside the acceptable boundaries of bourgeois femininity. Banks, unlike other male and female investigative journalists in
London, did not offer her readers the comfort of vicarious benevolence. Her refusal to “pose as a reformer” was a subtle but unmistakable criticism of the thousands of well-to-do men and women in London who, she implied, were posing as reformers and philanthropists. Banks’s phrase touched a sensitive nerve in Victorian society: as the Barnardo arbitration of 1877 had revealed, there was a world of difference between posing as a reformer and being one.
Many of the Weekly Sun’s readers, like the members of the Pioneer Club, were infuriated by Banks’s frankly self-interested approach to journalism. In the first batch of letters the editor of the Weekly Sun published after four parts of the “Cap and Apron” series had appeared, Miss Heather Bagon of Lewisham blasted Banks’s falsehoods and exaggerations and offered her own far reaching critique of gender and economic injustices in London. Bagon was appalled that Banks should profit by writing about the labors of hardworking girls: “In conclusion, let me say that I am enthusiastic enough to look forward to a time when every man will earn enough to keep his girls at home, and instead of their being set out to clean other people’s houses and being bossed by professional philanthropists, who climb to public notoriety and power over their backs, and make money out of their miseries, they will stay at home and clean and decorate their own mothers’ homes.”73
Banks’s lengthy reply to Bagon’s charges makes clear the extent of her break with British traditions of “philanthropic” journalism (male and female alike) and became the occasion for articulating her views about slumming, domesticity, and her ideal of relations between men and women. “I wish to disclaim all pretensions to being a philanthropist, professional or otherwise,” Banks declared. She refused to exalt the role of journalist as social crusader. “I am only a journalist, and I admit that a curiosity to see how the other half lives sometimes leads me to slum and investigate the condition of the poor and outcast of my own sex.” She readily acknowledged that she had sold stories about the hardships of the poor, but only to keep herself alive. “I have sometimes thought it not inconsistent to go slumming with a reporter’s notebook in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other.” What distinguishes Banks’s remark is not the fact that she sold her tales of slumming to support herself—after all, Greenwood was willing to enter the casual ward only because he had received a £30 advance payment from his own brother—but rather her willingness to be so open about her motives. She is the only person I encountered in researching this book who unashamedly used the word “slumming” to describe her own activities in London.
