Slumming

by Koven, Seth

  44. Sigmund Freud was intrigued by these questions as well and provided his own set of psychosexual answers. He described a group of people who “protect themselves against the loss of the object by directing their love, not to single objects but to all men alike; and they avoid the uncertainties and disappointments of genital love by turning away from its sexual aims and transforming the instinct into an impulse with an inhibited aim…. Perhaps St. Francis of Assisi went furthest in thus exploiting love for the benefit of an inner feeling of happiness.” See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1961), 49.

  45. His widow, Margaret, and her sister, Caroline Haddon, edited several substantial volumes of his heretofore unpublished writings throughout the 1880s. As Margaret Hinton reminded readers in the 1884 preface to her husband’s The Law Breaker and the Coming of the Law, “the throbbings of his heart are repeated in ours who read his words, and his hope for the world—a hope whose credentials are the more perfect love of the whole human brotherhood—is ever finding a wider response.” Margaret Hinton, preface to The Law Breaker and the Coming of the Law, by James Hinton (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, 1884), v. In March 1884, Oxford Magazine characterized the new Oxford movement at the ancient university, with its emphasis on cross-class brotherly love in the slums, as an outgrowth of Hinton’s plea for the well-to-do to serve their poor brethren in East London.

  46. A founding member of the Metaphysical Society in 1868, Hinton debated his ideas with the most influential male thinkers and writers of his day, including Alfred Tennyson, William Gladstone, Thomas Huxley, James Stephen, John Ruskin, F. D. Maurice, Henry Sidgwick, and Walter Bagehot. See R. H. Hutton, “The Metaphysical Society, A Reminiscence,” Nineteenth Century (August 1885): 177–196.

  47. Hinton, journal entry, 1870, as quoted in Ellice Hopkins, Life and Letters of James Hinton (London: C. Kegan Paul and Co., 1878), 290.

  48. On “nature” in Hinton’s philosophy, see James Hinton, Man and His Dwelling Place: An Essay towards the Interpretation of Nature (London: Smith, Elder, 1872) and Life in Nature (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1872).

  49. Hinton’s arguments about women’s freedom bear close resemblance to Ruskin’s in Sesame and Lilies, where Ruskin exalts women’s moral power and queenly authority based on their capacity for sacrificing for the social good. See Caroline Levine, “Self-Forgetfulness: The Radical Women of Sesame and Lilies” paper presented at the Mid-Atlantic Conference on British Studies, April 2001, New York, NY. Ruskin admired Hinton, “who could have taught us much,” and lamented his untimely death. See John Ruskin, vol. 29 of The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (George Allen: London, 1907), 67.

  50. James Hinton, vol. 3 of Unpublished Manuscripts (London, privately printed), 487–491.

  51. Hinton looked to his own life to validate his claims: “I have,” he wrote in February 1872, “ever since I lived in Whitechapel—for it was that that did it—desired service, and acted for it—desired with a desire that has no second, no second even in the sum of all other desires I have ever had…. Now what has it meant? That I have acted according to my pleasure.” James Hinton to Caroline Haddon, February 1872, as quoted in Ellice Hopkins, ed., Life and Letters of James Hinton (London: C. Kegan Paul and Co., 1878), 307.

  52. Mrs. Havelock Ellis [Edith Lees Ellis], Three Modern Seers: James Hinton, Nietzsche, Edward Carpenter (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1910), 24.

  53. The first biographical essay on Hinton appeared soon after his death as an extended obituary in Mind. See J. F. Payne, “James Hinton,” Mind (April 1876): 247–252. Ellice Hopkins, who had access to Hinton’s now lost diaries, manuscripts, and correspondence published the next major study of his life two years later. See Hopkins, Life and Letters.

  54. Spiritually adrift and seeking a vocation, Havelock Ellis had journeyed to the remote Australian outback at the age of nineteen where he first read Hinton’s Life in Nature. “In an instant,” he recalled more than a half century later, “the universe changed for me. I trod on air; I moved in light.” A few weeks later, he eagerly consumed Ellice Hopkins’s Life and Letters, which convinced him that he should emulate Hinton and become a doctor, an idea that he claimed “had never before so much as entered my head.” Havelock Ellis, My Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1939), 164, 169. Throughout the 1880s, Havelock Ellis tried hard to ensure that Hinton’s ideas would be accessible to a rising generation of men and women seeking solutions to sexual and social problems. See H[enry]. Havelock Ellis, “Hinton’s Later Thought,” Mind (July 1884): 384–405.

  55. On the fellowship and its links to Hinton, see Willard Wolfe, From Radicalism to Socialism: Men and Ideas in the Formation of Fabian Socialist Doctrines, 1881–1889 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 152, 305–306. Ellis and the founder of the fellowship, Thomas Davidson, exchanged a series of lengthy letters about Hinton’s teachings. See William Knight, ed., Memorials of Thomas Davidson, The Wandering Scholar (London: Ginn and Company, 1907), 37–43.

  56. On Hopkins and Hinton, see Rosa Barrett, Ellice Hopkins: A Memoir, with an introduction by H. Scott Holland (London: Wells Gardner, Darton and Co., 1907), 86–101. For Hopkins’s theology and her views about sex and gender reform, see Susan Mumm, “‘I Love My Sex’: Two Late Victorian Pulpit Women,” in Joan Bellamy, Anne Laurence, and Gill Perry, eds., Women, Scholarship and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge c. 1790–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), and Susan Mumm, “Ellice Hopkins and the Defaced Image of Christ,” in Julie Melnyk, ed., Women’s Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Transfiguring the Faith of the Fathers (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).

  57. On Noel and Hinton, see Desmond Heath, Roden Noel, 1834–1894: A Wide Angle (London: D. B. Books, 1998), 159–160. On Noel’s slum benevolence among children, see the Hon. Roden Noel, Selected Poems from the Works of the Hon. Roden Noel with a Biographical and Critical Essay by Percy Addleshaw (London: Elkin Mathews, 1897), xx–xxi, xxix.

  58. See Chushichi Tsuzuki, Edward Carpenter: Prophet of Human Fellowship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 68.

  59. The disappearance of his vast collection of unpublished manuscripts, manuscript autobiography, and letters (last owned by Edith Lees Ellis) has no doubt also curtailed scholarly interest in him.

  60. These rumors can be traced most fully in the correspondence of Havelock Ellis and Olive Schreiner, with Ellis more often than not attempting to defend Hinton against the many charges levelled against him. Discussing Hinton did allow Ellis and Schreiner to enter into quite intimate exchanges about sexual ethics and desire at a time when they were still sorting out their own romantic feelings for one another. See Yaffa Claire Draznin, ed., “My Other Self”: The Letters of Olive Schreiner and Havelock Ellis, 1884–1920 (New York: Peter Lang, 1992).

  61. Such charges must have been a terrible blow to his disciple Ellice Hopkins, who repeatedly emphasized in her adulatory Life and Letters of James Hinton her subject’s complete devotion to purifying relations between the sexes and righting the “wrongs and degradation of women” that weighed so heavily upon him. See Hopkins, Life and Letters, 14.

  62. Members of the Men and Women’s Club, who have received a great deal of scholarly attention, had good reason to feel anxious about their reputations. Club members were caught up in overlapping romances and complex love triangles even as they engaged in supposedly disinterested and scientific debates about sex questions. See Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, ch. 5. Henrietta Barnett, for example, never mentions the influence of Hinton on her development as a social reformer, though she did acknowledge her debts to the Haddon sisters. I have found only one reference to Hinton in Samuel’s writings and correspondence, both published and unpublished. See Samuel Barnett to Frank Barnett, September 1906, as quoted in Barnett, Canon Barnett, vol. 2 (1919), 197.

  63. For a brilliant and influential analysis of the link between collar wearing as sign of re
spectability and the contextual nature of social roles and identities, see Peter Bailey, “Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up? Towards a Role Analysis of Mid-Victorian Working-Class Respectability,” Journal of Social History 12 (1979): 336–353. Gail Ching-Liang Low analyzes the “visual and imaginative pleasure of stepping into another’s clothes” within the imperial and metropolitan contexts as “one of the central legacies of orientalism.” She offers nuanced insights into the relation between “cross-class dressing” and “crosscultural dressing.” See Low, “White Skins/Black Masks: The Pleasures and Politics of Imperialism,” New Formations (Winter 1989): 83–103.

  64. H. M. Hyndman caustically observed that “Englishmen of apparently decent character,” when far removed from the censorious gaze of rigidly respectable Mrs. Grundys, “stripped off” “conventional manners and morality as easily and almost as quickly” as they divested themselves of their tall hats and black coats. See H. M. Hyndman, The Record of an Adventurous Life (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911), 130. The well-to-do Katherine Roberts could not bear to take off her nurse’s uniform even after she had stopped working at a maternity hospital for poor women because it allowed her to “wander about in the evenings, or drop into the Pavilion for a bit, and have supper at a cheap restaurant, and feel Bohemian … for a little longer.” She believed that “one’s personality would change” the moment she put back on her usual costume of jewels and a smart frock. Katherine Roberts, Five Months in a London Hospital (Letchworth: Garden City Press, 1911), 144.

  65. William James to Henry Rutgers Marshall, February 8, 1899, in Henry James, ed., The Letters of William James, vol. 2 (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 88.

  CHAPTER ONE

  WORKHOUSE NIGHTS: HOMELESSNESS, HOMOSEXUALITY, AND CROSS-CLASS MASQUERADES

  1. The Lancet articles appeared in weekly installments in 1865 and 1866. Hart later became editor of the British Medical Journal. Through his marriage to Alice Rowland, Hart became closely tied to two of the leading social reformers of the day, his sister-in-law, Henrietta Rowland Barnett, and her husband, Rev. Samuel Barnett, the founders of the first university settlement in Whitechapel, Toynbee Hall. Hart published two articles summarizing the findings of the commission and put forward remedies. See Ernest Hart, “The Condition of Our State Hospitals,” Fortnightly Review 3 (December 1865): 218–221; and “Metropolitan Infirmaries for the Pauper Sick,” Fortnightly Review 4 (April 1866): 460– 462. In February 1866, in the midst of the furor surrounding “A Night,” Hart slightly modified and published in pamphlet form his first Fortnightly Review essay. The Lancet reports were also republished in single volume form as Report of the Lancet Sanitary Commission for Investigating the State of the Infirmaries of Workhouses, 1866. On Ernest Hart, see George Behlmer, “Ernest Hart and the Social Thrust of Victorian Medicine,” British Medical Journal (October 3, 1990): 711–713. Punch viewed Hart as a hero in the affair (as a man who had a “hart”) and sang his praises with its usual comic flair. See Punch (April 14, 1866), 160.

  2. See leader article in the Times (February 9, 1867), 7.

  3. Nightingale’s interest in workhouse infirmaries predated the Lancet series and had been prompted by the Liverpool philanthropist William Rathbone. See Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale, 1820–1920 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1951), 296–303. She detailed her scheme for placing trained female nurses in workhouse infirmaries to the great sanitarian, Edwin Chadwick. See Nightingale to Edwin Chadwick, July 9, 1866, in Martha Vicinus and Bea Nergaard, eds., Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale, Selected Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 270–274. For an excellent contemporary account of the Lancet’s campaign and workhouse infirmary reform, see Thorold Rogers, ed., Joseph Rogers, M.D., Reminiscences of a Workhouse Medical Officer (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889).

  4. On this campaign and the reform of workhouse infirmaries, see Gwendoline Ayers, England’s First State Hospitals and the Metropolitan Asylums Board, 1867–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), chs. 1 and 2.

  5. On the early history of the Pall Mall Gazette, see J. W. Robertson Scott, The Story of the Pall Mall Gazette, of Its First Editor, Frederick Greenwood, and of Its Founder, George Murray Smith (London: Oxford University Press, 1950).

  6. Frederick Greenwood acknowledged the key role of the Lancet and lamented the fact that the government only responded to social ills once they had been made into a “sensation.” He argued that the neglect of the health needs of “disabled poor” were probably more shocking and injurious than the “curious and picturesque” workhouse revelations of “A Night.” See Frederick Greenwood, “Curiosities of the Public Service,” Pall Mall Gazette (October 24, 1867), 1.

  7. In this respect, I follow Keating, who reprinted “A Night in a Workhouse” as the first text in his primary source anthology Into Unknown England, 1866–1913: Selections from the Social Explorers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976) and offers a cursory analysis of it in The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1971). As Lynda Nead succinctly and rightly argues, “social investigation should be understood as one of the centres in the nineteenth century which produced definitions of sexuality.” See Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 150.

  8. “The London Workhouses,” London Review (January 27, 1866), 112.

  9. The Gladstone Diaries, ed. H.C.G. Matthew vol. 6, 1861–1868, entry for February 5, 1866 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 416.

  10. South London Journal (January 27, 1866), 4.

  11. Many articles discussed the various reprints of “A Night” and its circulation across social groups. See South London Journal (January 27, 1866), 4.

  12. Pall Mall Gazette, March 7, 1866, hereafter cited as PMG. The French press reveled in the embarrassment “A Night” caused English officialdom. A complete version of “A Night” was translated and published in the Revue Britannique and reprinted in many other journals and papers. See for example, L’Écho de la France (April 20, 1866; and May 4, 1866). The provincial press in Britain also reprinted “A Night.” See for example, Liverpool Daily Post, supplement (January 15, 1866), 2; (January 16, 1866), 2; and (January 17, 1866), 2; the Birmingham Journal (January 20, 1866), 3. All the local papers serving individual neighborhoods in London, such as the Clerkenwell Journal and the Shoreditch Advertiser, reprinted “A Night” as well.

  13. On Mearns, see Anthony Wohl, ed. and introduction, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (Leicester: Leicester University Press; New York: Humanities Press, 1970) and Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), esp. chs. 11 and 16. On Stead, see Deborah Gorham, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon Re-Visited,” Victorian Studies (Spring 1976); and Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992), chs. 3 and 4.

  14. “A Night” was first anthologized by Peter Keating, ed. in Into Unknown England 1866–1913: Selections from the Social Explorers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976) and then by Sharon Winn and Lynn Mae Alexander, ed., The Slaughter-House of Mammon: An Anthology of Victorian Social Protest Literature (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1992). Historians of workhouses and homelessness invariably discuss “A Night” without mentioning its sexual dimensions. See for example, Rachel Vorspan, “Vagrancy and the New Poor Law in Late-Victorian and Edwardian England,” English Historical Review (January 1977): 66; Lionel Rose, “Rogues and Vagabonds”: Vagrant Underworld in Britain, 1815–1985 (London: Routledge, 1988), 114; Peter Wood, Poverty and the Workhouse (Wolfeboro Falls, NH: Alan Sutton, 1991), 154– 155. Mark Freeman has recently examined the genre of writings about incognito slum exploration in the Victorian and Edwardian period. While he devotes considerable attention to Greenwood and “A Night in a Workhouse” and notes the emphasis on themes of “incest, squalor, violence, and ignorance” i
n the literature, he misses entirely the homoerotic dimension that made “A Night” into a sensation. Freeman’s primary focus is on the methodologies used by these sociologists–slum explorers. See Mark Freeman, “‘Journeys into Poverty Kingdom’: Complete Participation and the British Vagrant, 1866–1914,” History Workshop Journal 52 (Autumn 2001): 99–121.

  15. “Queer” most frequently meant “odd” or out of the ordinary in the 1860s, though increasingly from the 1880s onward it was often used in specific contexts that also implied oddness or deviance in sexual arrangements. Here, I capture the ambiguity of its contemporary usage to convey both oddness and the possibility of sexual irregularity. On London as a “queer metropolis,” see Matt Houlbrook, “‘A Sun Among Cities’: Space, Identities, and Queer Male Practices, London, 1918–1957” (Ph.D. diss., University of Essex, 2002). On East London as a queer space, see Gavin Brown, “Listening to Queer Maps of the City: Gay Men’s Narratives of Pleasure and Danger in London’s East End,” Oral History (Spring 2001): 48–61.

  16. On the relationship between the organization of space and sexual desire, see David Bell and Gill Valentine, eds., Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1994); on post–World War II London in particular, see Frank Mort, “Mapping Sexual London: The Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution: 1954–7,” New Formations, 37 (1999): 92– 113; see also, Matt Houlbrook, “Towards a Historical Geography of Sexuality,” Journal of Urban History 27, no. 4 (2001): 497–504.

  17. W. T. Stead claimed that “A Night” led to the beginning of the reform of the Poor Laws. W. T. Stead, “Character Sketch: February. The Pall Mall Gazette,” in The Review of Reviews 7 (February 1893): 145.