Slumming
Page 40
Eros and altruism, self-gratification and self-denial, the desire to love the poor and to discipline their disruptive power: these seemingly opposed impulses were tightly and disconcertingly bound to one another. Far from offering an apologia for slummers—reformers, missionaries, journalists, sociologists, and social workers—I have focused on moments of particularly acute ethical ambiguity in their careers. Readers have encountered James Greenwood in the act of lying about his identity in order to discover sexual abominations supposedly secreted in London’s casual wards; Dr. Barnardo accused of abusing the children he rescued and circulating images many found indecent; Elizabeth Banks acknowledging that cash not kindness motivated her slumming; Winnington Ingram invoking his power as landlord and threatening to shut down the working-men’s club founded on principles of cross-class brotherly love. In each of these cases, the poor responded to and negotiated with their social betters. Some, like the parents of several children Barnardo photographed, expressed outrage at Barnardo’s “artistic fictions” and testified against him at his arbitration. Others, like Mrs. Stevens, manipulated lady slum visitors’ preoccupation with dirt to increase the alms she received. Still others, like Mr. Price of the Oxford House Club, demanded that male settlers live up to their own principles. In these moments and in their resolution we see most clearly the often invisible costs of benevolence paid for by the poor themselves. We also glimpse class relations, not as an abstraction, but concretely produced, reproduced, and changed through encounters between rich and poor.
Rather than caricaturing philanthropists as hypocritical agents of class interest, I have shown how satisfying their own varied needs—religious, social, sexual, psychological, and class—informed how they served others and conceptualized poverty. The women and men I have discussed in this book were far too ill at ease with their inherited middle-class social, sexual, and gender norms—too deeply engaged in seeking out new ways of understanding themselves—to defend the status quo. Engagement with slum benevolence often stimulated a critical, rather than complacent, cast of mind about relations between the sexes and the classes.
Well-to-do men and women voyaged into the slums of Victorian London to bear direct personal witness to the hardships of the poor. In unprecedented numbers, they experienced for themselves the sounds, smells, sights of slum life that they took to be irrefutable facts about poverty. In this sense slumming as a technique of gathering and organizing social knowledge suited the entrenched empiricism that was such a distinctive characteristic of British sociology. However, slumming and slum benevolence also tapped into the unruly passions of the moral imagination and into attempts to reconfigure class and gender relations and sexuality. The slums of London, I have argued, proved to be a fruitful crucible for the cultivation of heterodox sexual and social subjectivities. At least for some men and women, slums were spaces free from the inhibitions and prohibitions of middle-class domesticity and conjugality.
The readiness of philanthropists and their public to imagine the sufferings and squalor and vice of the poor fueled a remarkable flowering of charitable creativity and institution building in Victorian and Edwardian London. But it also opened up a gap between facts and fantasies into which elite men and women could and did project their own needs, desires, and values. To put it another way, it led contemporaries to debate what was fact and what was fantasy. In the intertwined naked bodies of men and boys in the Lambeth Casual Ward, the journalist James Greenwood saw sodomy and sexual depravity whereas the homeless man called the Real Casual saw desperation to keep warm and survive a freezing winter night in a miserably inadequate open shed. The logic of Greenwood’s depiction of his night in a workhouse pointed toward increasing surveillance of the poor and the regulation of male same-sex behaviors, which in turn contributed to the equation of homelessness and homosexual acts with the 1898 Amendment to the Vagrancy Act. The logic of the Real Casual would have required public officials to provide the homeless poor with shelters that respected and protected their dignity.
Greenwood and fellow slummers deftly transformed their sojourns in the slums into literary, social, political, and cultural capital. “A Night in a Workhouse” literally rescued the Pall Mall Gazette from bankruptcy. Dr. Barnardo widely circulated his erotically charged visual and written narratives about street waifs to raise the hundreds of thousands of pounds upon which his philanthropic empire rested. Elizabeth Banks quite happily admitted that she paid her bills by selling her tales of slumming to the highest bidder. Educated women used their knowledge of the poor to establish new professions within the public and private sector enabling them to live with one another and without men. Six months or a year’s residence at Toynbee Hall and Oxford House proved to be a valuable credential for young men eager to advance within the Church of England or the emerging social welfare bureaucracies of central and local government.
Philanthropists’ success in serving their own interests infuriated the working-class socialist and lifelong East Londoner, George Lansbury. In Lansbury’s eyes, most slum philanthropy, even at well-intentioned Toynbee Hall, was merely selfishness passing for altruism. “The one solid achievement of Toynbee Hall,” he bitterly observed in his 1928 autobiography, “has been the filling up of the bureaucracy of government and administration with men and women who went to East London full of enthusiasm and zeal for the welfare of the masses, and discovered the advancement of their own interests.” These men and women had conveniently decided, Lansbury continued, that “the interests of the poor were best served by leaving East London to stew in its own juice while they became members of parliament, cabinet ministers, civil servants…. [They] discovered … that after all, all the poor in a lump were bad and reform and progress must be very gradual; that the rich were as necessary as the poor—and indeed, that nothing must ever be done to hurt the goodhearted rich who keep such places as Toynbee Hall going out of their ill-gotten gains.”8
Leading scholars have so often quoted Lansbury’s withering critique, which was published in his 1928 autobiography, that it behooves me to evaluate it carefully.9 He had not always been so critical of Toynbee Hall and late-Victorian social reformers. In 1907, on an occasion Lansbury did not include in his autobiography, he offered a stunningly different version of the history and effects of late-nineteenth-century London’s class-bridging movements. He shared the platform at New College Hall, Oxford, with a most unlikely companion: Lord Hugh Cecil. Scion of the great aristocratic house of Cecil, bachelor son of the Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury, and a former resident of Oxford House, Lord Hugh is now best remembered as the irrational, “gauntly Elizabethan” diehard who refused to allow the Liberal prime minister, H. H. Asquith, to deliver his speech on the Parliament Bill on the floor of the House of Commons during the Revolt of the Lords in 1911. He was also the author of the classic manifesto of the Conservative Party, Conservatism (1912).10 Drawing upon the lessons he had learned as a resident of Oxford House, Lord Hugh articulated an organic, deferential vision of social relations, stressing interdependence and hierarchy, that lay at the heart of the Conservative Party’s approach to the urban poor from the 1890s until World War II.11 The work of Oxford House, Lord Hugh explained in language anticipating his argument in Conservatism, “built together the separate atoms of society; it cemented together what had become divided and individual, so that they founded again a healthy social organisation.” When the applause subsided, Lansbury rose to speak. Far from attacking the words of the noble lord, he extended the heartfelt thanks of laboring men for the good work of Oxford House and Toynbee Hall. He had come to admire and respect these men of wealth and education and hoped that more would come to share in their “good work.” “Oxford was not sending her men” to the slums of London, he insisted, “with any ulterior object” beyond their desire to improve society.12
What had happened between 1907 and 1928, when Lansbury published his autobiography, to account for his drastic reevaluation of the settlement movement? Lansbury’s rema
rks in 1907 and 1928 need to be read for what they are: interpretations of Victorian slum benevolence that reflected the concerns of a specific historical moment. In 1907, trade unionists and socialists, including Lansbury, had just begun to form themselves into the Labour Party and were still seeking allies across the political spectrum among those committed to improving the lives of laboring people. By 1928, the Labour Party was eager to reclaim its fragile claim to office and determined to erase all traces of its former ties with the pre–World War I world of liberals, progressives, and social reformers.
How can the evidence presented in this book help to take stock of Lansbury’s antithetical claims? Is it possible to make sense of two such apparently irreconcilable judgments? In one key respect, Lansbury’s criticisms in 1928 hit the mark directly. The educated men and women who lived and worked in the slums did become leading members of Parliament, cabinet ministers, civil servants, and social welfare workers. They staked out their authority to define and propose solutions to ills besetting society based on their experiences living in the slums.
His scornful claim that they left East London to “stew in its own juices” while advancing their individual and collective class interests is both simplistic and inaccurate. No doubt from his perspective, the salaries of civil servants, politicians, and social workers seemed munificent compared to the wages East Londoners earned as jam workers and laundresses, French polishers and gas fitters. Such a comparison, however, obscures the reality that these men gave up lucrative careers in business and the professions—readily available to them by virtue of their class, familial connections, intelligence, and education—to pursue much more modestly remunerated and less glamorous work as public servants.
While few stayed on in their adopted districts as permanent residents, most could never quite get away from the scenes of their youthful slum labors. For example Clement Attlee, Lansbury’s own deputy in the 1930s and the Labour prime minister after World War II, returned over and over to his days at Toynbee Hall and the club for boys “mostly barefoot and ragged” in Limehouse that he managed.13 He concluded his major speech in the House of Commons in support of the National Insurance Bill (based largely on the policy recommendations of another Toynbee Hall man, William Beveridge) by recalling the indelible impression of the poverty he had witnessed “forty years ago in Limehouse.”14 Far from confirming Attlee’s sense of class superiority and his satisfaction with the status quo, his fourteen years in East London made him a thoroughgoing democrat who was highly sensitive to the relationship between poverty and cultural values.15
Living in the slums did not necessarily lead women and men to a single party affiliation or ideological destination. Slum philanthropists spanned the political spectrum, from ardent Christian Socialists such as the historian R. H. Tawney to reactionary paternalists such as Lord Hugh Cecil to maternalist Conservatives such as Lady Astor. What so many of them shared in common was a determination to look closely at the human face of poverty and find ways to redress the injuries of class. We can find their signatures on most landmark social welfare legislation of the first half of the twentieth century, from the collaboration of Margaret McMillan and Robert Morant in securing the passage of the Medical Inspection of School Children Act of 1907 to the implementation of the Beveridge Report in the aftermath of World War II.
With that smug but anxious arrogance of youth, William Beveridge wrote to his fretful parents in 1903 assuring them that his interest in Toynbee Hall and East London and the poor had nothing to do with either “slumming” or “social problems.” He utterly distrusted “the saving power of culture and missions and isolated good feelings as a surgeon distrusts ‘Christian Science.’”16 There is no reason to doubt for a moment that Beveridge meant what he said. But his disavowal of slumming and social problems belies the much deeper streams of thought, feeling, and belief that flowed between sympathy and science, private philanthropy and public welfare, eros and altruism. For better and for worse, British social policy after World War II was as much the consummation of a century of slumming as it was an emphatic rejection of it.
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