Slumming
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After almost one thousand pages Miss Brown lurches to an improbable and unsatisfying end. Anne abandons her aspiration to enter into a community of independent women and devotes herself to rescuing her would-be rescuer, Hamlin, as his wife. In some sense, Anne acts precisely the way a woman is supposed to: she annihilates her own desires to care for a man by marrying him. But this misbegotten union, far from resolving the novel’s many plots and arguments, merely underscores that two of the pillars of bourgeois respectability, marriage and philanthropy, are not what they appear to be. Both are implicated in perverse same- and opposite-sex romances, which are literally and figuratively unclean and which often collapse into one another. Hamlin’s seemingly benevolent desire to save Anne from her life as a maid is counterbalanced by his “mysterious temptations of unspeakable things, beckoning his nobler nature into the mud.”98 Perhaps even more significantly, Anne explicitly connects marriage to Hamlin with the embodiment of soiled femininity: she likens “loveless” marriage to a “mere legalised form of prostitution.” “To become, therefore, the wife of Hamlin,” Anne reasons to herself, “was an intolerable self-degradation—nay, a pollution” (3: 280). The dirtiness of Anne’s marriage is magnified by her awareness that in marrying Hamlin she would “become the wife of Sacha’s lover” and thereby be contaminated by Sacha’s perverse sexual appetites. When Anne finally does yield to Hamlin and consent to be his wife and be touched by him, “It seemed to Anne as if she felt again the throttling arms of Sacha Elaguine about her neck, her convulsive kiss on her face, the cloud of her drowsily scented hair stifling her. She drew back, and loosened his grasp with her strong hands” (3: 298). As Kathy Psomiades astutely points out, the “climactic moment of heterosexual union is displaced by yet another experience of the arms, the kiss, the drowsily scented hair of Sacha Elaguine”—that is, a sexually perverse and aggressive woman.99
Miss Brown’s ending, far from signaling Lee’s capitulation to the conventions of the novel and her acceptance of bourgeois values, seems to adopt a rhetorical strategy often deployed by male sexual dissidents in the late nineteenth century. It neither inverts nor rejects dominant social and sexual norms. Instead, the ending appears to sanction and reproduce these norms while allowing those readers who have understood the novel’s many “queer” romances to enjoy its subversion of them.100 Or does it? After all, as Lee’s anguished diary entries reveal, she believed that she was emphatically not merely “posing” as a moralist but that she was one. Male aesthetes and sexual dissidents like Oscar Wilde intentionally mobilized a coded language of same-sex eroticism in their writing and hoped that those who were meant to break the code would. Lee’s novel, unlike Wilde’s literary productions, is a tirade against the sins of aestheticism, which she identifies not only with sexual perversion but with the indifferent refusal of aesthetes like Hamlin to clean up the poor. Unlike Wilde’s delight in word play in his plays and prose, there is nothing intentionally parodic about Miss Brown’s bitter satire. Just as Dr. Barnardo’s photographs of ragged children simultaneously incited and condemned viewers’ desire to see “street arabs” as erotic objects (see chapter 2), so, too, Lee thrusts her readers into a world of proliferating and titillating perversions that she then demands that we abhor. But Lee’s attempt to pathologize dirt and dirty desires cannot escape from her own obsessive attraction to and fascination with both. Her stance as a conventional moralist, signaled by her resort to marriage as the novel’s resolution, is utterly unconvincing. Anne’s and Walter’s marriage threatens to corrode from within rather than buttress the institution of marriage and the ideological apparatus of cross-class benevolence.
The more that Lee appears to reject the impurities and sexualities she depicts, the more vehemently her readers and critics (then and now) have insisted that these sexualities express her deepest, albeit unmentionable, desires. Such an interpretation uncomfortably insists that Lee’s “no’s,” motivated by her sincere quest for personal and social purity, are really “yes’s.” But we need to be careful in coercing Lee’s assent to become for readers today what she resolutely chose not to be in her own lifetime. In Miss Brown and in the conduct of her private life, Lee ultimately eschewed lesbian sexual liberation even as she was a central participant in the emerging lesbian subculture of late Victorian and Edwardian London. Like the spinster do-gooders who populated London’s settlement houses and countless charitable committees, Lee preferred to express her sexuality through celibacy and emotional intimacy with other women and to express her concern for the poor through fetishizing physical and moral cleanliness. In the years after she published the novel, Lee herself sought out, and apparently found, “thrilling” impressions in the London slums.101 She and the female companion who replaced Mary Robinson in her affections, Kit Anstruther Thomson, spent the night at an outpost of glorified spinsterdom, the Canning Town Women’s Settlement. The surrounding slums—“almost pitch dark & inconceivably grimy and foul”—enraptured her with their exotic mingling of people laboring amid the pathetic chaos of the dockyards.102
The expatriate American novelist Henry James seems to have understood Miss Brown and its ending all too well, though it certainly brought him very little pleasure. There was far too much at stake for James personally, since Lee had dedicated “for good luck” her first novel to “kind Mr. James who is most sweet and encouraging.”103 When he read Miss Brown, his response was anything but kind or encouraging. To a friend, he confided that the novel was “painfully disagreeable in tone … a rather deplorable mistake to be repented of.”104 To Lee, he was somewhat more diplomatic though quite critical. Anne’s marriage to Walter Hamlin, he explained to Lee, struck him as “false, really unimaginable.” James, who preferred to delicately suggest but never articulate the sexual demons haunting him and his fictional creations, criticized Lee for having “impregnated” her characters “too much with the sexual, the basely erotic preoccupation.” He urged her to write another novel, one less hotly moral so that she would seem “less immoral” to her readers.105 While Miss Lee did not return to the novel as a literary form for many years, James heeded his own advice. His next two novels, The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima attempted to demonstrate to Lee and the world just how a great novelist ought to treat passionate friendships between high-minded spinsters and the sublimated erotics of the “passion” for “charity” prevailing on both sides of the Atlantic in 1885. In particular, James’s eponymous Princess liked seeing “dirty hands,” and “queer types and exploring out-of-the-way social corners” and “took romantic fancies to vagabonds of either sex.” She situated herself at the apex of an unstable homoerotic love triangle with two radical artisans, the manly Paul Muniment and the androgynously effeminate Hyacinth Robinson, who appears to love Paul at least as much as the Princess herself. Hyancinth’s suicide at the novel’s end, apparently galvanized by his failure as a political anarchist, seems just as likely to mark a moment of despairing recognition of his own sexually anarchic desires for Paul.106 Read in this way, The Princess bears distinct traces of James’s attempt to reckon with Lee’s influence over him and to rewrite Miss Brown in a way that satisfied his literary and moral sensibility.107
A decade later, Mrs. L. T. Meade wrote A Princess of the Gutter, a novel about an heiress who, like James’s and Lee’s heroines, is fascinated by the spectacle of urban poverty and decides to live among the poor. Raised in the comforts of the Anglo-Irish clerical elite in Cork, Meade had made her way to London as a young woman determined to earn her living through her pen in defiance of her father. Her financial and literary success was swift and remarkable. From the late 1870s until her death in 1914, she produced over 250 books while editing a journal for girls and young women, Atalanta, and contributing countless articles to periodicals such as the evangelical Sunday Magazine. Meade and the female journalists who came to interview her went out of their way to emphasize her gracious womanliness and maternal involvement in the rearing of her children. Meade insisted that she put
“domestic claims” before “those of the publisher or public.” An interviewer for the Sunday Magazine underscored that her study, the space within her home she used to pursue her career, reflected “womanly attention,” not professional ambition and independence.108 An interviewer sent by the Young Woman gushed that “a healthy tone pervades all her works, and her pictures of English home life in particular are the best of their kind.” “Her personality is like her writings,” the interviewer continued, “bright, fresh, vivacious.”109
At the same time, Meade was much less conventional than such portraits would suggest.110 Her professional schedule left little time to attend to her own household. With a full-time staff of two or three female secretaries, who took dictation and typed for her, Meade toiled at her editorial office in the city until seven each night; she returned to the comforts of her suburban villa in Dulwich and, after dinner, “spent every evening correcting proofs.”111 She was an active member of the Pioneer Club in London, which attracted New Women, like Mona Caird, who were eager to discuss the “various movements for women’s social, educational and political advancement.”112 Even more tellingly, Mrs. L. T. Meade was not really Mrs. Meade at all. Her maiden name was Elizabeth (Lucy) Thomasina Meade; in 1879 she married the solicitor, Alfred Toulmin Smith. She was thus either Miss Meade or Mrs. Smith. “L. T. Meade” and “Mrs. L. T. Meade,” the names she used for interviews and on the title pages of her books, were noms de plume, suggesting her unwillingness to disappear entirely into the identity of Mrs. Alfred Smith.113
Meade’s novels reflected her extensive firsthand knowledge about educated spinsters and their philanthropic enterprises in London. She wrote a series of essays about women’s colleges for Strand Magazine in the early 1890s. She was deeply involved in evangelical philanthropy in London and actively supported Benjamin Waugh and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children from its inception in 1884.114 From her first major success, Scamp and I, A Story of City By-Ways (1876), Meade was fascinated by the plight of poor girls and boys and the middle-class spinsters who sought to rescue them.115 Unlike most of her novels, which Meade insisted did not portray specific individuals, Meade attempted in A Princess of the Gutter “to make this picture of life amongst our great unclassed as faithful as possible” and sketched one of its protagonists “from a living original” (preface, iii). The book made claims to document not just general truths but particular facts about East London.
Meade’s engagement with philanthropy was matched by her strong views about the moral obligations of the novelist and the power of her novels in shaping the imaginations and aspirations of her readers. Girls needed books that reflected and molded their “inner lives.” In marked contrast to Vernon Lee’s ambiguous moral universe, Meade saw the world in terms of a clear-cut struggle between good and evil in which good must and always did prevail. Naughtiness, high spirits, frankness, compassion, and independence were qualities Meade gladly sanctioned in her fictional creations and in her readers. She abhorred duplicity, slyness, and vindictiveness.116 Her views on novels—and women novelists—were equally vehement and straightforward. She denounced social-realist and sensational novels for circulating “microbes thrown off from disease.” Reading itself could become a form of slumming, one every bit as capable of infecting the reader in the privacy of her home as a descent into the actual filth of a slum tenement. The modern woman writer bore an especially heavy burden of guilt. “In her hands there is no delicacy, no reverence, only a tearing aside of the curtain of reserve and decency…. I do think the hour has come for every right-minded mother in England to raise her voice in protest against this horror in our midst.”117
These may have been Meade’s guiding principles, but A Princess of the Gutter strayed extremely far from them in its depiction of women’s sisterly love for one another.118 The book is an examination of the connections between women’s desire to wash away the dirt of slum life and their queer lives as sisters in the slums. It chronicles the social awakening of a recent girl graduate of Girton College, Cambridge, Joan Prinsep, who inherits a fortune derived from dilapidated slum tenement properties. Like so many nonfictional narratives written by female reformers, Princess depicts how Joan’s conscience is pricked by her sensory impressions of the slums: “The broken windows were stopped up with rags, the floors were grimy with dirt, and vermin swarmed all over the horrible place” (73). She literally places her “clean soft hand” upon the bodies of the unclean people she meets (71), but the intimate contact almost causes her to faint (75). Joan’s initial expedition, like those of real-life female slum explorers such as Alice Hodson and Mary Higgs, ends with a hot bath, which purifies her and also serves as a kind of baptism into her new life as a servant of the poor (77). She soon moves into one of London’s most notorious slum districts, the Old Nichol (called Jacob’s Court in the novel), the scene of the real life philanthropic labors of the celebrated Anglican slum priest Father Jay, who was immortalized by Arthur Morrison’s Child of the Jago (1896) less than a year after Princess was published.
A reviewer of Princess for Literary World praised it as worthy of Sir Walter Besant, the most commercially successful slum novelist and philanthropic journalist of his generation. However, in marked contrast to Besant’s best-selling All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), which featured a wealthy brewery heiress who devotes herself to the East London poor only to find love there with a West End male philanthropist, Meade’s heroine has no romantic interest in men or marriage. While spinsters’ nonfictional slum narratives often included an amusing scene in which working-class girls wonder why their lady friends have neither a male suitor nor a husband, no one in Meade’s novel even mentions the possibility that Joan would be romantically involved with a man.119 Nor is this surprising since from the outset we learn that Joan has a surfeit of the “masculine element” in her (14).
Meade, unlike Lee in Miss Brown and James in Princess Casamassima, relegates marriage and opposite-sex romance to the margins of her girlcentered narrative. The central love story of the novel revolves around Joan and a charismatic “rough gel” from the neighborhood, Martha Mace.120 Joan is immediately drawn to Martha who, like Bernard Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle, is “so deliciously low—so horribly dirty.” Joan is no condescending Henry Higgins, however, and Martha proves much more affectionate than Eliza. We first see Martha through Joan’s admiring eyes.
The girl stood now at the entrance door. Her hair was in steel curlers. She wore an untidy cotton blouse and an old skirt made of some drab material, which was partly out at the gathers, and streamed in a short, dirty train behind. She was a well-made buxom-looking girl, but her face was covered with smuts, and grimy from want of washing…. Will you come and see me this evening? … I have come here to make friends with girls like you. (121)
Joan’s philanthropic, and, I would argue, romantic, interest in Martha depend on her outward dirtiness. Joan wants to make friends with a living representative of a sociological category—dirty girls like Martha—so that she can enjoy the spiritual reward of converting their minds, bodies, and souls. But Joan also glimpses beneath Martha’s “smuts,” detects her strength and beauty, and resolves to be “like a sister” to Martha and her “mate” Lucy Ashe (123). Joan couches her physical attraction to Martha in religious language: “God meant you to be beautiful…. God gave you a beautiful face and a grand figure” (143).
By deploying religious and familial rhetoric—sister, daughter, mother—Meade, in her fictional Joan, and other elite women slum reformers, in their nonfiction, distanced themselves from the unspeakable and perhaps unimaginable relationship of lover or spouse.121 But the working-class girls in Princess, Martha and Lucy, are much less inhibited in how they define their “mateship”: “[I]t’s as good as bein’ married in some ways, an’ with none o’ the troubles” (127). Beatrice Potter’s “morbid” and “hysterical” cousin Margaret Harkness had encountered “mateship” in the 1880s while living and working in East London as a nurse, jour
nalist, and novelist. In her own “nasty book” novel about the Salvation Army and sexual anarchy, Captain Lobe (1887), Harkness’s “man-hating proletarian labor mistress” rebukes two factory girl “mates” who passionately kiss on the job.122 Invoking this working-class slang, the aristocratic Anglo-Catholic slum priest James Adderley sincerely hoped that Muriel Wragge “had a ‘Mate’ to live with” when she returned to Hoxton as head of a local social welfare organization, the Maurice Hostel.123
A close observer of girls’ schools and women’s colleges, Meade was familiar with the school girl “crush” or “rave,” which she helped popularize through novels such as A Sweet Girl Graduate (1891). Joan’s and Martha’s relationship conforms to some of the literary and erotic conventions of the “rave” as sensitively analyzed by Martha Vicinus: a passionately admiring love between an older and better-educated female teacher and a younger girl on the verge of womanhood. Vernon Lee’s private life was dominated by a string of such relationships, in which she played the parts of both the “ravee” and the “raved.” But the hallmark of these relationships, the enhancing of desire through the preservation of emotional and physical distance, is notably absent.124 This is all the more remarkable because Joan and Martha are divided by age and authority as well as by an immense class distance.