Slumming

by Koven, Seth

  While Banks altogether disclaimed philanthropy in her journalistic slumming, Harkness advanced a withering critique of it. In Harkness’s writings, the philanthropic impulse is symptomatic of underlying psychosexual pathology, an unnatural “disease of caring about the sorrows of the world.”100 Men’s altruism is merely a convenient cover for the expression of illicit erotic desires. Each of the case studies of women’s work in the British Weekly series demonstrated that low wages led great numbers of laboring women to exit respectable society through the “door of escape” always open to members of their vulnerable sex and class: prostitution.101 Drawing on critiques of male impurity so effectively publicized by Josephine Butler in her campaigns for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act,102 Harkness revealed the hypocrisy of bourgeois gentlemen, whom she portrays as either sexual predators or gender dissidents. Her bitter 1887 slum novel, City Girl, revolves around the seduction of a beautiful East End Catholic girl, Nelly Ambrose, by a West End philanthropist, Arthur Grant, treasurer of a nearby hospital for poor women and children. Grant’s callous sexual exploitation of Nelly is matched by the way her employers, owners of a sweatshop, ruthlessly exploit her labor.103

  The British Weekly and Banks both investigated the wages and conditions of labor of watercress girls and flower girls—beside prostitutes, the most ubiquitous class of unchaperoned women workers walking London’s street until the 1880s. Charitable agencies had directed their missionary gaze to flower and watercress girls in London at least since the 1850s in part because, as Carolyn Steedman argues, “the connection between flower and cress selling and prostitution was very easily made.”104 The British Weekly’s female commissioner found no romance but lots of squalor in flower girls’ struggles to survive. The commissioner took her readers into a flower girl’s sordid room whose sole furnishing consisted of “a four-post bedstead on which was a filthy mattress and an old torn blanket” and a “dirty yellow apron” stretched across the cracked glass of the window. After elaborating on the nuances of procuring, cleaning, and marketing flowers and watercress, the commissioner concluded that for every flower girl who “rises in life high enough to possess a [lucrative] whelk business, ten sink under the demoralizing influence of street-life” and turn to vice.105

  Banks was drawn to impersonate a flower girl because of the incongruity between the beauty and innocence of the wares the girls sold—their flowers—and their own unkempt and vicious appearances. Like the British Weekly commissioner, Banks recounted the system used by the girls to procure their wares from Covent Garden as well as their hours of labor, their expenses, and income. But whereas the British Weekly used its detailed account of the lives of particular flower girls to force readers to confront their physical misery and moral danger, Banks used her exposé to suggest new and more fetching ways for the girls to arrange their wares in their baskets. While Banks observed that many of the flower girls she met had lost “all semblance of womanly modesty” and indulged in “obscene and profane talk,” she did not directly connect their demoralized condition to her conclusion that no flower girl could honestly earn more than eighteen shillings a week.

  Banks astutely recognized that debates over protective labor legislation, the rapid influx of sweated immigrant labor, and the growth of women’s trade unionism had stimulated the British public’s appetite for stories about women’s labor in London. For radical and socialist women such as Black, Harkness, and their mutual friend Annie Besant, publishing the results of their inquiries was an effective instrument for exposing and also mobilizing protest against the endemic abuses of capitalism, in particular the ruthless commodification of women’s labor. Banks, in contrast, participated fully in late Victorian commodity culture and transformed her own slumming into print so that she could sell it. Banks skillfully mimicked the form—though a good bit less of the substance—of the discipline of empirical sociology as practiced by that pioneering cohort of women experts on female labor including Black and Beatrice Potter. But Banks’s interest in women’s work and her analysis of it were always subordinated to her needs as a popular woman journalist. In notable contrast to Black and Harkness, she avoided political controversy and refused to acknowledge the interconnection between prostitution, the structure of women’s wages, and the labor market. Banks presented her findings largely through descriptions of what she herself did, felt, and saw in her various assumed roles. Her method of collecting data and her style in presenting it combined to produce an intensely personal sociology in which the self and the social are purposely intermingled.

  The American Girl versus the English Lady

  Banks’s motives for her journalistic slumming—producing copy to sell to newspapers and magazines—confirmed what many Londoners already suspected. Americans put money before morals. Rudyard Kipling, in an essay he published in the Times of London in December 1892, condemned the “indecent restlessness” of American society, its ostentation, and its obsessive worship of “Baal of the Dollars.” American women were “worn out” and “go to pieces very readily.” (Presumably, Kipling believed he had rescued his own American wife, Carrie Balestier, from such an unappealing fate.) American men, Kipling snidely observed, sacrificed their gentility to the single-minded pursuit of business. More damningly, they allowed their wives to form the rank and file of the “the pauper labour of America.” Unlike English ladies, who commanded armies of sixteen-pound-a-year-household servants, American women performed their own household chores.106

  A few days later, the Times published Banks’s vigorous defense of American national character and American women under the caption, “An American Girl’s Reply to Mr. Kipling.” It was an auspicious debut for an unknown American which touched in passing upon many of the themes she would develop in depth in the months and years ahead.107 In her series, “The Almighty Dollar in London Society,” published in the conservative and clubby St. James’s Gazette between January 10 and 16, 1894, Banks responded to Kipling’s denigration of American materialism thirteen months earlier. She brilliantly exposed the hypocrisy of English men and women who professed disdain for American money while scheming to get some of it for themselves. Posing as an American heiress, Banks advertised in the papers for a “chaperone of highest social position” to “introduce her into the BEST ENGLISH SOCIETY.” More than eighty ladies and gentlemen replied, each demanding a substantial payment for his or her services. As one of the Gazette’s headlines emphasized, Banks had shown “the market value of high social position.” Given the prominent attention society-page editors paid to matches between such American heiresses as Jennie Jerome and Consuela Vanderbilt with cash-poor English nobles and the growing fear that American women were outpacing English ladies in making attractive marriages with the cream of English masculine society, few readers would have had difficulty appreciating the extent of the American Girl’s triumph. Banks’s Campaigns were at least partly an extension of her debate with Kipling over national identity as expressed through ideas about class and gender in England and America. She had challenged one of the most cherished and deeply institutionalized beliefs about English life: that class position could not crudely be equated with wealth because its essence lay out of reach of the marketplace in the world of long-inculcated cultural norms and social behaviors.

  Banks’s “mercenary” approach to journalism and her refusal to disguise herself as a philanthropist were hallmarks of her persona as the American Girl in London. They suggested that the American Girl was as brazenly “almighty” as the American Dollar. Why were her efforts linked in the English imagination to the particular traits of the American Girl?

  Some English commentators attributed Banks’s wild behavior as a journalist to the promiscuous freedoms of the American Girl so brilliantly depicted by Henry James’s eponymous Daisy Miller. Banks’s readers had quickly discerned from her use of colloquialisms that the authoress of the “Cap and Apron” series was an American. The day after the St. James’s Gazette published the final installment of
“The Almighty Dollar in London Society,” one of the paper’s regular columnists compared the freedoms of English and American women. The author ruefully remarked that “some of us were under the impression that the English girl had got about as far along the plank of freedom as was desirable” until American journalists in New York had begun to complain about the suffocating system of chaperonage in England.108 In particular, English observers complained that the “untrammelled” freedom of American college girls was producing a generation of hysterics and anorexics who pursued their own selfish desires in defiance of the biological obligations of their sex.109 Gertrude Atherton put the question quite simply to readers of Annie Swan’s The Woman at Home: “How far has the (suppositious) American girl influenced the English girl of the present generation?” Her answer: the revolt of the modern English girl may well be the consequence of “the invasion of the American maiden, both in fact and in fiction.”110 Just as several English “lady” journalists criticized Banks for introducing American style female journalism to London and degrading the moral tone of the English press, so, too, some feared the consequences of the Americanization of the English Lady by the American Girl.

  This fear was compounded by several factors. First, many already shared Matthew Arnold’s view that New Journalism was itself a “featherbrained” American import intended to pander to the degraded tastes of the newly enfranchised democracy.111 Second, Londoners daily confronted unmistakable evidence that at least parts of the metropolis had fallen under the sway of erstwhile colonial subjects and other outsiders: Jews, Indians, Africans, Italians, Australians, and Americans.112 Banks’s reversal of the prerogatives of empire—her descents among the London poor disguised as one of them—was part and parcel of the larger threat of the Americanization of London and metropolitan culture in the late nineteenth century. In an article Banks contributed to Living London, which was edited by her friend, G. R. Sims, she detailed the visible signs of this process. Buoyed by a population of American expatriates exceeding twenty thousand and many more tourists, London merchants, hoteliers, restaurateurs, and even bankers vied for the American trade. Bill-boards and advertisements welcomed American customers. American flags festooned whole blocks of Piccadilly and Regent Street. Restaurants served Boston-style pork and beans while English shops were jammed full with American-made consumer goods and recipes. All of these things were materials signs of America’s growing economic and military might, which made it such an attractive outlet for British capital investment while also portending Britain’s relative decline as the paramount world power in the years ahead. Without a trace of irony, Banks noted that “with its good points and its bad ones,” American journalism had become a permanent part of the London press. “Some papers being ‘run’ on the American plan, it of course, follows that the importation of American journalists has become a necessity, so all along Fleet Street American journalists can be seen at any hour of the day, and almost any hour of the night as well, flying hither and thither.” Banks, with uncharacteristic modesty, offers no hint of the part she played in this transformation of the English press.113

  The American Girl did have plenty of English defenders and admirers, and not only among the growing community of Anglo-American suffragists and women’s activists. If Kipling had belittled the American woman as a nervous drudge, others admired her self-sufficiency and mental quickness. Mrs. H. R. Haweis, wife of a slum clergyman and music aesthete and herself a pioneer in interior decoration, contributed a story to the Young Woman in January 1894 extolling the virtue of the American girl as a “bright, self-helpful creature … well educated, but not a prude.”114 Discussion of the virtues and vices of American and English women briefly became the subject of a heated and amusing transatlantic debate in the early autumn of 1896 spurred on by London and New York journalists quick to recognize a good story. The initial salvo in this entirely press-created furore was fired by an American woman in London who insisted on the superiority of English men over American, and American women over their English counterparts. A wittily vituperative essay by an Australian man published in the October 1896 number of the Contemporary Review provided a common point of reference for readers on both sides of the Atlantic and throughout the empire. The author contended that the status of women in any given nation or civilization was the most accurate barometer of its well-being. American women were lamentably deficient in “self-sacrifice, devotion, trustfulness, gentleness, tenderness, delicacy, a high sense of duty, singleness of purpose.” As “the most finished product of the democratic principle” in action, they were “the most unconsciously selfish beings on the face of the earth,” obsessed with claiming rights and disavowing their duties.115 Needless to say, such outrageous remarks provided abundant material for the proliferation of dissenting and assenting views in the metropolitan presses of New York and London. The New York Sun, playing on the inflammatory rhetoric of imperialism, ran a headline announcing that the whole world had declared “War On American Women.”116

  Here was a print controversy as perfectly tailored to Banks as the stylish suits she favored. Her published contributions to this debate reflected her ambivalence about her status as the American Girl in London, which in turn mirrored her surprisingly critical assessment of the Americanstyle investigative journalism she herself had championed. Forever putting on disguises, she found herself constantly reevaluating English and American gender ideologies and social values. At the outset of the controversy, Banks found an unlikely champion of the American Girl in the great Chinese minister, Li Hung Chang, famous for his suppression of the Taeping Rebellion and his cooperation with Britain’s greatest imperial martyr, “Chinese” Gordon. During the minister’s highly publicized diplomatic visit to London (and shortly thereafter to the United States) in the summer and autumn of 1896, Banks had secured the first interview with him by brazenly camping outside his residence during the breakfast hour. She had demanded that Li Hung Chang weigh in on the international question of utmost importance: the relative merits of American and English womanhood. The “wily Chinaman” (the phrase is Banks’s) had obliged by declaring “the most beautiful and clever women in all the world are the American women.” Needless to say, Banks basked not only in the glory of his praise for American women but in her headlinegrabbing scoop. By the time she had arrived in New York a few weeks later, she herself captured headlines as the “wee mite” of an American woman who had dared to interview Li Hung Chang.117

  For the next few weeks, Banks gladly stepped forward as New York’s chief expert on Anglo-American gender politics. Playing the part of cultural interpreter and intermediary she had mastered during her previous four years in London, Banks offered comparisons between the sexes of each nation. English women were not up to date but she envied the “sweet, low, well modulated tone” of their voices and their unobtrusive skills as hostesses. English women lacked the independence, vivacity, originality, and conversational daring of American women; they put their husbands before their children, whom they left to nurses to raise; they not only had chaperons but appeared to need them.118 English men possessed calm and “Old World courteousness and devoted much less of their daily lives to pursuing wealth compared to American men. But their attractiveness was marred by their blatant favoritism of sons over daughters. American men took pride in educating their daughters.119 Banks praised the extensive network of women’s colleges in America, many of which allowed girls from poor families to perform domestic work and housekeeping in exchange for tuition. Banks herself had spent four hours a day polishing silver and china during her years as a student while mingling on the basis of perfect equality with her wealthier peers. In England, only a girl with some means could afford to go to Cambridge women’s colleges such as Girton and Newnham, unless, by dint of exceptional intellectual prowess, she won a highly competitive scholarship. The manual labor Banks performed at college was incompatible with what it meant to be young lady in England. For Banks, the differences between the two systems thre
w into sharp relief the benefits of American democracy and the limitations of the English class system in shaping the character of women in the two countries.120

  However, Banks also found much to criticize about the American Girl. In an article introducing her as the American Girl two years before the Anglo-American war of the sexes, Banks had played the part of the English critic. “I can always tell an American girl here [in London] directly I see her…. She is louder, and talks more; her bump of reverence is not so large as an English girl’s.” “I admire the quietude and modesty of your girls very much,” she continued, “but they might be all the better for a little of our smartness.”121 During her years in New York, she wrote many articles under the byline “The Englishwoman in New York.” She clearly enjoyed the perverse symmetry of the situation. When she returned to London in 1898 after two years as a yellow journalist in New York, she concluded without a hint of irony that England was “blessed” not to have a yellow press.122