by Koven, Seth
CROSS-CLASS SISTERHOOD AND THE POLITICS OF DIRT
Victorians across the political spectrum unanimously decried the messy squalor and moral degradation of urban life and vied with another to evoke the fascinatingly repulsive smells, sounds, and sights of the city. Some, like the famous sanitary and educational reformer of the 1830s and ’40s, J. P. Kay, literally exhausted themselves in finding words adequate to represent the disgusting scenes they encountered.6 Such descriptions were no mere flights of fancy or figures of speech, though they sometimes were both. Even the most salubrious commercial precincts of Victorian cities were dirty places, and the mere act of crossing a street in London without benefit of a sweeper leading the way inevitably left its mark on the shoes and clothing of the walker. If dirt was a ubiquitous fact of urban life, commentators increasingly identified the slums of East London after the cholera epidemic of 1866 with every form of literal and figurative impurity: contaminated water and fallen women; insect- and incest-riddled one-room tenements; rag pickers and rag wearers. Four decades later, the intrepid slum explorer Mary Higgs put the matter quite simply: “London acts as a kind of national cesspool.”7 But London did more than serve as a receptacle for the nation’s refuse; it was also a prodigious producer of it. The dust heap that dominates the landscape of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend was a metaphor for the wastage of capitalism, both human and inanimate. But dust heaps were also actual sites within the metropolis, attended by men, women, and children whose scant “wealth” was refuse itself. The Thames, Britain’s foremost imperial waterway, was a source of wealth and waste. Its bottom was regularly dredged by mudlarks, whose picturesque garb and extreme filthiness enthralled Arthur Munby, the age’s foremost connoisseur of dirt and collector of photographic images of begrimed women. A sometime poet, civil servant, and instructor at the Working Men’s College, Munby carried his obsession with dirt to the point of secretly marrying his maid of all work, Hannah Cullwick.8
Dirt was emphatically political in nineteenth-century Britain. Abetted by the rapid growth of the sciences of social statistics and hygiene, a host of men and women—politicians, civil servants, clergymen, doctors, and male and female philanthropists—turned to state and local government and private initiatives to contain and combat dirt. Traditional histories of public health, protective labor legislation, housing and slum clearance, the medical inspection of school children and the provision of ratefunded school baths celebrate the gradual but inexorable victory of the bureaucratic forces of order over the chaos produced by unregulated industrial capitalism and urbanization. While men such as J. P. Kay, Edwin Chadwick, and John Simon dominate these histories, scholars in recent years have increasingly recognized the key roles played by women, largely in the voluntary sector, including Mary Carpenter, Florence Nightingale, Ellen Ranyard, and Margaret McMillan.
Dirt and its politics were gendered from the outset of the campaigns to eradicate it. Benthamite men in the early Victorian years controlled many of the most influential positions within the central government, and domestic ideals powerfully informed their vision of how best to purify the social body.9 The second generation of social welfare administrators, however, had no choice but to cooperate with and rely upon the labors of well-to-do women, who mobilized themselves into a growing army of social housekeepers intent on both purifying the city and asserting their ability to control slum spaces and dwellers. These women justified their initiatives by invoking the separate-spheres ideology and the writings of one of its most renowned, albeit unconventional exponents, John Ruskin. In Ruskin’s oft-reprinted essay on women’s public and private roles in society, “Of Queen’s Gardens,” in Sesame and Lilies, he contended that the proper sphere of women extends beyond the home into the surrounding public spaces of civic life. “Generally, we are under an impression that a man’s duties are public, and a woman’s private. But this is not altogether so,” Ruskin explained. Woman’s duties expanded “without her gates” to “assist in the ordering, in the comforting, and in the beautiful adornment of the state.”10 Ruskin’s words inspired future generations of civic-minded women, especially middle-class spinsters, to take up public work, but they also confirmed the social reality that during the preceding decades women had already made substantial contributions to the multifaceted movements for social and moral hygiene. In the 1840s and ’50s, the Ladies Sanitary Society in Manchester, Angela Burdett-Coutts’s work on behalf of prostitutes and ragged children, and Louisa Twining’s famous Workhouse Visiting Society were in the vanguard of this movement founded on the belief that well-to-do women had the right and obligation to minister to their downtrodden sisters and children.
While elite women’s freedom to explore the lives of their poor sisters continued to expand in the 1860s, they were still constrained by expectations of what a lady could and could not do. For example, in the aftermath of James Greenwood’s incognito descent into the men’s casual wards in January 1866, the sanitary and poor-law reformer J. H. Stallard decided to mount similar inquiries into the condition of women’s casual wards. But he contended that unlike gentlemen, with their chameleonlike abilities, no true lady could successfully disguise herself as a tramp and associate with the poor “on the footing of equality” needed to disclose the truth about workhouse conditions. Through every spoken and unspoken gesture, she would immediately reveal her essential gentility: “no rags would disguise her character, no acting conceal her disgust.” Undaunted, Stallard hired “Ellen Stanley,” a once respectable widow, impoverished through no fault of her own, who “purposefully went out as dirty as [she] could” to gain admission to the casual wards of London’s workhouses.11
Despite her long experience of poverty, even Ellen Stanley was unprepared for the filthy sights, sounds, and language of the ward. The earthen floor of the water closet overflowed and oozed with excrement because the impure water and food caused mass diarrhea among the female inmates; women tore off and ripped up their rags in agony from the incessant bites of vermin. And Stanley silently prayed that the great banking-heiress-turned-philanthropist, Angela Burdett-Coutts, would “hear the groans of the women and the wailing of the children” and relieve the misery of her “sisters” (49).
Stanley’s incognito exploration may have been inspired by Greenwood’s, but the story she told was far different from his and underscores how class and gender shaped slum investigators’ representations of the bodies of the poor. In contrast to Greenwood’s coy staging of his descent into the casual ward with its revelation of sodomitical orgies, Stanley’s narrative is utterly devoid of titillating pleasures. Where Greenwood lingers over his description of the bodies of the beautiful youths he encounters, Stanley feels horrified empathy for the nude, lice-infested female bodies she sees. Sex only enters her story as the potential and real threat of male sexual assault on all the female inmates, whose abject poverty both defines them as sexually available and disqualifies them from the protection of the police.12 It is hardly surprising that Ellen Stanley, a poor woman, felt no attraction to dirt. She lived far too close to dirt to romanticize it; her very survival and self-respect depended upon the daily struggle to keep her body and clothes clean.
Two decades later, a handful of well-to-do women dared to imitate Greenwood and Stanley and disguised themselves in the rags of poverty to see for themselves how the poor lived.13 What made this possible? The broadening of social and educational opportunities for bourgeois women with the creation of women’s colleges; the extension of local government franchise to propertied women; the rise of women journalists and female professions emerging out of the social hygiene movements of mid-century; and the appearance of the New Woman in fiction—all these developments contributed to elite women’s newfound freedom to move through urban space.14
For upper- and middle-class women raised in homes with armies of domestic servants—cooks, parlour maids, charring girls—immersing themselves in the dirtiness of the slums was a literal and symbolic act of independence and adventure.15 In Dece
mber 1883, Punch, that most sensitive and merciless barometer of shifting social fashions, lampooned slumming and women’s self-serving investment in it. While the cartoon implicated both men and women in its satire, it focused on women’s fantasies about slums as sites of dangerous pleasures. As a party of upper-class women surrounded by formally attired servants beats a hasty retreat from a social gathering, the hostess asks incredulously why her guests are wearing hooded, full-length mackintoshes. “Lord Archibald is going to take us to dear little slum he’s found out near the Minories—such a fearful place! Fourteen poor things sleeping in one bed, and no window!—and the Mackintoshes are to keep out infection, you know, and hide one’s diamonds, and all that!” Despite Lord Archibald’s role as sherpa in the slums, women bear the brunt of the cartoon’s charge that slumming was insensitive and sensation-seeking. The mackintoshes they wear are quite literally bodyguards, meant to protect elite women’s bodies from being taken over by the infectious filth of East London. At the same time, the cartoon makes clear that these women crave the very dangers they fear. Why else would they choose to go slumming?
Such images were far from mere fancy. When Katherine Symonds, daughter of the famed man of letters John Addington Symonds, resolved to “undertake help at Toynbee Hall” in 1898 her mother “was afraid that I should pick up some infectious disease, and cancelled the plan.” Undaunted, Symonds did eventually work at the Charity Organisation Society’s Whitechapel office, not far from the famed university settlement.16 Punch’s visual satire mocked upper-class responses to contemporary revelations about the plight of “Outcast London” even as it buttressed men’s claims that they were better suited than women to understand and solve the problems of metropolitan poverty.17 Regardless of whether women went slumming merely for an evening or devoted themselves to a lifetime of friendly visiting in the slums, all women engaged in slum philanthropy had to contend with public perceptions of them as voyeuristic and self-interested.
The writings of prominent women social welfare advocates suggest that Punch all too accurately captured the importance of spectacular filth in their initial attraction to slumming. Dirt was not only a visible sign of poverty but a marker of a sexualized “primitive” to which highly cultivated single women were drawn. For Mary Higgs, the middle-class widow of a Manchester clergyman, the homeless poor she met while disguised as a tramp were literally vestiges of an uncivilized past, individuals “permanently stranded on lower levels of evolution.” But Higgs also insisted that “wise social legislation” could “quicken evolution” and reclaim individuals from their state of moral and physical dereliction.18
Higgs’s incognito inquiry into female tramp life demonstrated first, that dirt could and did control poor women’s economic fortunes, and second, that the economics of dirt were closely bound up with laboring women’s sexual vulnerability. Higgs observed that official regulations governing London’s casual wards mandated the confiscation of inmates’ clothing, making it impossible for paupers to wash or mend them. Each time a woman resorted to the casual ward (or cheap lodging house), she left it a dirtier, shabbier person and hence less eligible for paid employment. In this way, workhouse regulations trapped female inmates in a vicious downward cycle whose logical endpoint was prostitution.19 Higgs lamented that dirty bodies and clothes literally soiled not only individual women’s lives but the nation itself.
The authority of middle-class women like Higgs to enter the squalid and dangerous precincts of the poor was predicated on their own irreproachable personal morality. At the same time, these women understood well that the power of their slum narratives, and thus their ability to establish their credentials as experts, derived at least partly from their willingness to pollute their own bodies in the name of protecting the imperiled purity of their outcast sisters. The prostitute, as the embodiment of all that was dirty in Victorian culture, functioned simultaneously as the female slum worker’s doppelganger and her opposite. Compelled to put on “other [tramps’] dirty nightgowns,” Higgs could “hardly describe [her] feeling of personal contamination” as vermin claimed possession of her body. Throughout her night in the casual ward, Higgs also grappled with the terrifying prospect that the male pauper employed by the casual ward would make good his threat and force her to have sex with him. Higgs’s revulsion at donning the lousy clothes of female tramps only heightened her sense of sisterly solidarity with them.
Dirt, Higgs argued, was a literal and figurative marker of a woman’s economic and sexual status; the two cannot be disentangled in either Higgs’s analysis of the horrors of female tramp wards or in her slumming narrative. As a result of her incognito slumming, Higgs suffered a devastating hemorrhage brought on by the harsh treatment in the tramp wards. But she also effectively transformed her nightmarish experiences into political capital as she vigorously campaigned to reform conditions in female casual wards and municipal lodging houses. Publication of her studies of female tramp life in leading periodicals and books instantly made her into a celebrated expert on social problems and gave her access to influential male policy makers. With evident pride, she informed skeptical male members of the Departmental Committee on Vagrancy that her exposé of female casual wards and her analysis of female vagrancy had been “sent to every woman guardian and to the chairman of every board of guardians throughout the country.”20
The socialist-feminist Muriel Lester, like Mary Higgs, recalled the origins of her love for the poor in her horrified curiosity about the dirty spaces and faces she glimpsed from her first-class train carriage as she sped from her country home through the slums of East London en route to the pleasures of the West End. Lester structured her autobiography to make her childhood encounters with the “sight and smell” of poverty into a kind of primal trauma that shaped her future life choices. Asked to attend a party of East End factory girls, she accepted the invitation as a pleasant diversion from her pampered and idle life but soon found herself “addicted” to East End visiting. She “longed” to enter the interiors of the factory girl’s lives and homes and to master the outlook, patterns of speech, and secrets of the denizens of her adopted neighborhood, whose lives she endowed with romantic glamour. Years later, Lester insisted that “love for the people” not “duty” motivated her work for the poor. She “hated the very word [duty],” whose coldness was at odds with the joy she brought to her labors.21
Lester’s day-to-day work in the slums propelled her toward the selfcritical realization that her investment in the “dirtiness” of the poor, which was so crucial to her social awakening, was incompatible with the deeper life of sisterhood and brotherhood she sought. She joyfully recalled that the night before she and her sister Doris opened a teetotal pub and club for their neighbors in Bow, they cleaned and scrubbed the rooms themselves. For an educated daughter of the well-to-do, the mere act of doing hard cleaning—and not in telling others how or where to clean—constituted an assault on prevailing class and gender norms even after World War I. Many of the Lesters’ poor neighbors were delighted by such maverick ideas and practices, which provided the foundation for deep and enduring relationships. One East Londoner warmly recalled that the Lesters’ modest settlement house “played such a large part in my mother’s life and in my own upbringing virtually from the cradle.”22
The nurse, journalist, social investigator, and member of the London School Board, Honnor Morten, abandoned the comforts of her lovely home for a room in a “terrible street in the slums” where she “lived … as the people lived, for weeks and months, scrubbing, washing, cooking, marketing and all the rest, and going about all day nursing the sick poor.” As she explained to an admiring interviewer sent by the Young Woman in 1900, “if you really want to know how the poor live, you must live as they do, but not only for a week or ten days.”23 Such a vision of cross-class sisterhood remained shocking—and newsworthy—well into the 1920s. The London papers sent a reporter and photographer to capture Rosa Waugh Hobhouse, daughter of the founder of the SPCC (Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children), “cleaning the windows in her workman’s dwelling at Hoxton.”24 Hobhouse understood the symbolic importance of her gesture, which was calculated to draw attention to her radical social and political agenda. Her decision to live a life of voluntary poverty, which included cleaning her own house, stood within but also criticized a long tradition of cross-class sisterhood in the slums. Along with her husband, Stephen Hobhouse, and her friends Muriel Lester and Mary Hughes (daughter of the famous Christian socialist author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Thomas Hughes), she refused to pretend that the poverty they had chosen for themselves was in any way the same as the involuntary poverty of their neighbors. At the same time, Mary Hughes adopted a life of such intense material self-denial that she was often mistaken for one of the tramps she sheltered at her famous Dewdrop Inn.
