Slumming
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The nature of surviving sources suggests that we can gain deeper insights by examining what role, if any, same-sex desire—not same-sex acts—may have played in structuring the moral imaginations of elite women engaged in slum philanthropy. We also need to begin to see that the apparent eschewal of sex (however we may construe “sex” as physical acts) cannot be equated with the absence of sexuality. For many unmarried philanthropic women (like the celibate religious and philanthropic men I will discuss in chapter 5), celibacy constituted a reasoned and deliberate choice about how to express their sexuality, as well as a logical extension of their fetishized obsession with cleanliness in their work in the slums. Sexual purity, along with education and class status, entitled them to live in the slums apart from men and the conventions of middle-class femininity as experts in child welfare, social hygiene, charity visiting, and district nursing.78 Understood in this way, the burdens of preserving their own purity while regulating the “dirt” of the urban poor cannot be divorced from their emancipatory consequences in their lives and for future generations of women.
“NASTY BOOKS”: DIRTY BODIES, DIRTY DESIRES IN WOMEN’S SLUM NOVELS
Novels constitute one rich set of sources that historians can use in reconstructing the sexual dynamics of women’s romances with the slums and with one another in late Victorian London.79 As with all sources, they pose particular challenges and offer particular opportunities. I claim neither that these fictions transparently represent social reality nor that they offer the concealed “truth” about the motives underpinning cross-class benevolence. But novels do constitute attempts by their authors to organize self-consciously what they saw, thought, and read about the world of slum philanthropy they knew quite well. The ways they chose to make sense of this world—the discursive resources they mobilized as writers of fiction—drew upon already available ways of conceptualizing slums, dirt, and cross-class relationships. They also offered new possibilities for thinking about slumming and the novel as a literary form. Novels register not just what can be said, but also what cannot be said, and sometimes, what cannot be fully understood by contemporaries. Novels can give us access to cultural attitudes—and fantasies—about urban dirt and female sexual desire, which may allow us to reread and put greater pressure on our traditional historical sources.
Many female reformers believed that novels could and did powerfully shape women’s perceptions of the poor and their moral sensibility. Some frankly acknowledged that reading novels about slumming had sparked their own curiosity about how the poor lived.80 They saw novels as a way to prompt middle-class girl and women readers to feel obligations to the poor and to act on them. Muriel Lester believed that “the forceful imagery of Olive Schreiner’s book Dreams awoke thousands of people to feel shame rather than pride in possession of riches,” which in turn led many to go out “to the ends of the earth with a passion for friendship in their hearts.”81
Two novels, Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown (1884) and Mrs. L. T. Meade’s A Princess of the Gutter (1896) offer particularly fertile opportunities for exploring the relationship between female sexual subjectivity, the regulation and representation of dirt, and philanthropy. Lee and Meade make an unlikely pairing. Lee’s given name was Violet Paget. She was a paradigmatic figure of fin-de-siècle sexual dissidence who adopted the masculine nom de plume Vernon Lee not only as a writer but also in her private life in the late 1870s and ’80s. Her companion of her final years described her as a “homosexual” (a term Lee never used to describe herself) who rejected physical intimacy and “never faced up to sexual facts.”82 Mrs. L. T. Meade, by contrast, was a pillar of respectability, a wife and mother, a staunch Evangelical, and the age’s most prolific author of wholesome books for girls and young women.
Both women were deeply attuned to their self-presentations as women, to their public performances of gender. John Singer Sargent’s 1881 portrait of Violet Paget (she was still called this by many in her circle at the time) and surviving photographs of her from 1912 capture her determination to look and act the part of Vernon Lee—that is, a male bohemian intellectual. Bespectacled, having short cropped hair and stylishly mannish clothing, Lee flaunts her deviation from norms of female beauty (figure 4.1). Meade zealously protected and shaped her public image. As two photographs taken for an article in a popular women’s magazine illustrate, she projected a reassuring image of bourgeois respectability, feminine charm, domestic comfort, and maternal solicitude. She literally embodies Ruskin’s Queen in the Garden as she takes her tea surrounded by her two children and their fancy pet dog. The Persian carpet covering the lawn pays homage to Meade’s ability (or rather to the labors of her invisible servants) to extend her domestic dominion to nature itself (figures 4.2a and b). Comparing the lives and fictions of Lee and Meade makes it possible to explore a wide range of representations of female sexual and philanthropic subjectivities that calls into question the stark contrasts their portraits immediately suggest.
FIGURE 4.1. Photograph of Vernon Lee, c. 1912. (Courtesy of Colby College Special Collections, Waterville, Maine.)
Lee burst upon the English literary and artistic scene in the early 1880s after a peripatetic childhood on the continent. Of Scottish, French, Welsh, and putative Russian origins, Lee’s family had made its fortune in the eighteenth century with Jamaican sugar—and the blood of African slaves, a fact that haunted her life and fiction.83 She is perhaps best remembered today as Henry James’s “Tiger Lady,” whose brightly burning green eyes, acid tongue, and insights into human passions (including James’s own) terrified and attracted him. In 1893 Henry James confided to his brother William, that she is “as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent which is saying a great deal.”84 A virtuosic woman of letters and inveterate lover of women, she had quickly insinuated herself into highbrow and high-minded literary and artistic circles in London and Oxford. In the months leading up to writing Miss Brown, she was a regular guest of the bohemian socialist and pre-Raphaelite set that gathered at William and Jane Morris’s Hammersmith home. She mingled freely and frequently with sexually dissident literati such as Frances Power Cobbe, John Addington Symonds, Mark André Raffalovich, and Walter Pater. Though she was never intimate with “the wonderful Oscar Wilde,” they sometimes found themselves at the same social gatherings, and Lee invariably recorded her barbed impressions of his “lyricosarcastic maudlin cultschah” conversation.85 Her letters of the 1880s and ’90s constitute a de facto guidebook to the intersecting and overlapping worlds of metropolitan philanthropy, political radicalism, and bohemian sexuality. She attended meetings of groups ranging from the Salvation Army, the Fabian Society, and the Fellowship of the New Life, to the Socialist League, the Social Democratic Federation, and exiled Russian Nihilists. Her circle of female acquaintances included the radical Jewish novelist and poet, Amy Levy; the social scientist and expert in women’s labor, Clementina Black; the foremost woman journalist and critic of the New Woman, Eliza Lynn Linton; the idealistic Leeds socialist, Emily Ford; and the uncompromising founder of the Women’s University Settlement in the slums of south London, Alice Gruner.
FIGURE 4.2. These photographs of Mrs. Meade are designed to remind readers that Meade was not only a literary celebrity but also a devoted mother and womanly woman. In marked contrast to the androgynously bohemian garb Lee favored, Mrs. Meade’s blouse in figure 4.2a is all feminine ribbons and flounces. In figure 4.2b, “In the Garden,” Mrs. Meade quite literally plays the part of Ruskin’s “Queen” in her garden, surrounded by her two children, a tea pot, and gorgeous flowers. (From Sunday Magazine, vol. 30, 1894. Courtesy of Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.)
As the mania for slumming gathered momentum and merged with aesthetic projects devoted to the cultural elevation of the masses, Lee found in slumming a subject well suited to her temper and keen eye for “those melancholy little psychological dramas which go on, unseen to the world, in a man’s soul.”86 While she herself did not go slumming until the mid-1880s, Lee’s descriptions
of slum philanthropy were based on the impressions of her intimate and constant female companion of these years, Mary Robinson, who helped to run a club for working-class girls that was affiliated with the Working Men’s College. The result of her musings about the philanthropic and aesthetic worlds to which she had so recently been welcomed was her sprawling three-volume novel, Miss Brown, published in 1884 to exceptionally hostile public and private reviews.87 It was these reviews which prompted Lee to seek understanding and, perhaps, some solace, in autobiographical reflection.
In one of the two fragments from her voluminous diaries (written in 1883–34) that she could not bear to destroy, Vernon Lee agonized over the relationship between the pure and the impure, the dirty and the clean, the moral and the immoral—in the world and within herself. Such oppositions, lavishly staged and forever collapsing into one another in her writings, consumed Lee, who pondered the “slightly demoralized moralizings” of the past and present.88 As she confessed in an 1884 essay, “we”—by which she presumably meant her readers and herself—feel an “imperious necessity” to gaze upon some “horrible evil” made all the more horrible because of “the still fouler intermeshing of evil with good.”89 History taught, Lee insisted, that “meanness … lurks in noble things” and “nobility … lurks in mean ones.”90 Written at a moment in
history when Londoners claimed to be shocked by the foul intermeshing of evil with good within the metropolis, Lee’s fictions, histories, and art criticism rejected a simplistic division of humanity into an enlightened and benevolent elite and an unwashed and immoral underclass. The social and psychological portrait she painted was bold and unnerving in its embrace of moral ambiguities, which were, she argued, symptoms of mongrelized sexual, racial, and national identities.
Here are some excerpts from Lee’s 1884 diary fragment. Lee took advantage of the freedom from formal conventions of syntax and logical argument offered by diary writing to produce a text that reads like an interior monologue careening from self-confidence to self-doubt and selfloathing back to self-justification. She begins by lamenting the limits of the novel as a literary genre.
I will show fight … when it came home to me that the anonymous reviewer in the Spectator was not alone in accusing me of having written … a “nasty book.” I will show fight, argue, prove that I am in the right, that the restrictions placed upon the novel in England are absurd, that my novel is legitimate and praiseworthy.
It is impossible to say with certainty what connotative meanings Lee attached to the word “nasty.” The Christian socialist Charles Kingsley had immortalized its association with shoddiness and exploited labor in his 1850 pamphlet Cheap Clothes and Nasty; but in the 1890s, one of Havelock Ellis’s informants for his study of lesbianism used the word “nasty” repeatedly to describe her own homosexual practices.91
Lee’s resolve to fight immediately yields to uncertainty as she wonders whether merely by representing immorality—albeit to condemn it—she has unwittingly reproduced it.
I am accused of having, in simplicity of heart, written with a view to moralise the world, an immoral book; accused of having done more mischief by setting my readers’ imaginations hunting up evil than I could possibly do good by calling upon their sympathies to hate that mischief; accused, in short, of doing in a minor degree the very things for which I execrate Zola or Maupassant.
Having located herself within and against the literary tradition of corrupting and sensational French naturalism, she then turns inward and offers an interpretation of her novel as a mirror of her diseased self. Her repeated use of the word “morbid”—a proto-psychological word often (though not exclusively) denoting same-sex desire—invokes the language of sexual dissidence.
What if I had myself a morbid imagination made more morbid by a hundred accidents of training and reading…. Am I not perhaps mistaking the call of the beast for the call of God; may there not, at the bottom of this seemingly scientific, philanthropic, idealising, decidedly noble looking nature of mine, be something base, dangerous, disgraceful, that is cozening me.92
A year later, the Irish novelist and playwright of sensation George Moore added grievous insult to injury. He attempted (without Lee’s permission) to include excerpts from Miss Brown in an anthology of “the most improper” writings that, unlike his own, had escaped the ever-vigilant censors at Mudie’s famous circulating library. Lee met Moore over dinner at the home of the parents of her beloved Mary Robinson; Mary set Moore straight and succeeded in removing Miss Brown entirely from Moore’s “dirty collection.”93
What had Lee written in Miss Brown to provoke such passionate self-doubts and strong reactions from reviewers? Miss Brown centers on a wealthy effeminate poet-painter Walter Hamlin, who falls in love with an idealized image of womanhood he projects onto Anne Brown, a sullenly beautiful nursemaid of Italian and Scottish descent. As Lee was writing Miss Brown, she was still reeling from the death of a beautiful real-life Anne, Anne Meyer, for whom she had an idealized but unconsummated passion. “It is sad,” she wrote in her diary, “to have to admit to myself that had she [Anne] lived we might perhaps have not got much nearer to one another, never perhaps to that point of seeing, of being able to touch and embrace the whole personality.”94 Hamlin is the novel’s antihero who, like the name and persona of Vernon Lee, functions as Lee’s male double. Hamlin is no gentleman seducer of servant girls. He is described as an “aesthete” and “a queer creature … [not] in the matter of wrists and waistcoats, but in the matter of women” (3: 201). Sexual queerness and aestheticism remain inextricably linked in Hamlin, as they do more generally in the novel. Anne Brown is repelled by her benefactor’s lack of manly passion, fortitude, and vigor. Hamlin’s artistic genius is marred by “emasculating vices”—“longings after untold shameful things”—inherited from his immoral West Indian slaveholding ancestors (2: 52, 88). Hamlin’s apparent benevolence, his Pygmalion-like project of cultural elevation, is doubly self-incriminating. On the one hand, it appears to be motivated by his selfish desire to transform Miss Brown into a suitable wife and object of perfect beauty. On the other, his lack of physical desire for her combined with the insistent reminders of his feminine appearance suggest that one of Hamlin’s secret vices is not merely effeminacy but sexual inversion. Anne alone can rescue Hamlin, “this womanish fine gentleman” from his own decadent, self-destructive inclinations (1: 177).
The slums of East London appear in Miss Brown as an almost obligatory site of elite female benevolence. But oddly, they are the place which produces the only clean and healthy romance in the novel between one of Anne’s benevolent female friends, Marjory Leigh, and a sweetly sincere High Church slum priest, Harry Collett, who “had renounced a good living … in order to become a curate in the East End of London”(2: 156). The narrator’s description of their courtship anticipates Ella Pycroft’s romance with Maurice Paul a few years later: both parties were “perfectly unaware” of their own intense flirtations, which were disguised by their earnest discussions of “charity reorganisation” and “ventilation” (2: 158). Philanthropic slumming in London is a sexed activity in Miss Brown, but one which conforms to normative expectations of opposite-sex romance and morality.
The foulest physical spaces we encounter in the novel are not where we would most expect them—East London—but the derelict one-room country cottages owned by Walter Hamlin. In this respect, Lee challenged social workers’ persistent identification of the sunlight, water, and dirt of country life as a necessary and purifying antidote to urban squalor. We can be quite sure that the armies of female settlement house workers across London spearheading the annual excursions of the Children’s Country Holiday Fund (founded by Henrietta and Samuel Barnett) had no intention of sending their charges to stay in one-room cottages. Mirrors of their negligent and impure owner, Hamlin’s cottages are hotbeds of filth and sexual perversion, beset by incest rather than inversion. Anne describes the cottages as “abominations” whose “sordid, filthy reality” lit
erally nauseates her (2: 164). Dirt and “unnatural” sex are cause and consequence of one another. She desperately tries to convince Walter to rebuild the cottages into physically and morally clean dwellings. Despite her elevation to the status of a lady, she continues to play the part of the nursemaid in her determination to clean up other people’s dirt. But to Anne’s horror, Walter prefers to aestheticize the dirt and vices of his poor tenants by immortalizing them in his poetry rather than taking philanthropic action (2: 204). Like a latter-day Baudelaire, Hamlin insists that that “there is something very grand and tragic in this sin flowering like evil grasses in that marsh” (2: 213). Anne’s disgust with Walter’s “fleshly” aestheticism makes her long to plunge into and clean dirt. She yearns to return to her former life as a maid with “the tattered furniture and ill-swept rooms, the dirty and noisy kitchen with the haunting smell of sink; the dull routine of washing and ironing and mending, of dressing and undressing the refractory children” (2: 218). But recognizing the impossibility of such a return, she instead sets her sights on the dirt of East London, first vicariously through books and then directly by undertaking “ghastly rounds in the slums.” Her cynical but practical cousin, Richard Brown, insists that she, like Hamlin, has merely transformed the squalor of the poor into an aesthetic experience worthy of Pater. The “very wise” get “as many moments of thrilling impression as possible” out of art and song, and “the less wise out of vice or out of philanthropy,” he snidely informs Anne (2: 227).
While Hamlin’s strange cross-class romance for Anne forms the core of the plot, it can barely contain the novel’s “erotic counterplotting” which, Terry Castle has argued, is a hallmark of lesbian fiction.95 Erotic counterplots swirl around Anne, whose beauty is hyperbolically sexualized while she paradoxically remains “a mere sexless creature” (2: 249) who wants nothing more than to flee men altogether and become a student at a women’s college. Anne is a racially and sexually “unaccountable mixed type.” The narrator and other characters persistently liken her complexion to that of a Jewess or Ethiopian, and her figure to one of “Michaelangelo’s women”—that is to say, she possesses an essentially male body masquerading in a woman’s.96 While Hamlin’s transgressive sexuality is debased and corrupting, Anne’s sexual ambiguity, her status as a woman “born to have been a man,” is part of her womanly purity. In spite of and because of her purity, Anne inspires the sexual passions of several men and women. The novel typologizes a range of same-sex longings among women which range from a violent schoolgirl crush (3: 238) to the unrequited love of an educated spinster friend (2: 137) to the sapphic and vampiric attentions of the sexually omnivorous Sacha Elaguine, who successfully seduces Walter and attempts to consume Anne.97