Slumming

by Koven, Seth

  93. Ibid., 12.

  94. See Ian Gibson, The English Vice: Beating, Sex, and Shame in Victorian England and After (London: Duckworth, 1978), esp. chs. 5 and 6. Apart from Swinburne’s writing, most flagellant literature, Gibson explains, depicted male and females, not males with other males (282).

  95. Reynolds, Startling Revelations, 8.

  96. Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” American Historical Review (April 1995): 325, 334.

  97. Reynolds, Startling Revelations, 7–8.

  98. The arbitrators accepted Barnardo’s version of the events surrounding the flogging of Reed for insubordination. See Night and Day (November 1, 1877), 128.

  99. Ibid., 130.

  100. First published separately as Leaflet No. 6 (Second Series), the story was reprinted in Rescue the Perishing (1875), lxxiii–lxxvi.

  101. [Henry Gladwyn Jebb], Out of the Depths (London, 1860). On the publication of the novel, see Derek Hudson, Munby, Man of Two Worlds (Boston: Gambit, 1972), 22.

  102. T. Barnardo, Rescue the Perishing, lxxv. Caroline Bressey has used Barnardo’s admission and case records for the Williams children to reconstruct their history with some precision. The information about the children and their mother contained in these records differs considerably from the story Barnardo first published about them, along with their photograph, in Rescue the Perishing (1875) and later retold as “Three Woolly Black Heads” in his magazine, Night and Day (February 1898). The admission record describes the children’s father, Peter Williams, as an “Englishman” and ship’s cook whereas Barnardo’s published account makes him into a “mulatto” and “coloured” sailor. Presumably, Barnardo believed that the English public would be less sympathetic to the plight of Mrs. Williams if they knew that she had been married to a white Englishman. Bressey argues that Barnardo intentionally sought to produce the impression that Peter and Elizabeth Williams had once been slaves. See Caroline Bressey, “Forgotten Histories: Three Stories of Black Girls from Barnardo’s Victorian Archive,” Women’s History Review 11, no. 3 (2002): 351–374.

  103. Barnardo notably tells us nothing about the fate of the youngest child, a boy, whom, we must assume, enters the less familial setting of the barracks in the boys’ home.

  104. The image simultaneously draws upon deeply racist rhetorics while demonstrating that Barnardo, unlike so many of his contemporaries, accepted people of all races into his homes as a matter of policy. For a perceptive reading of issues of race and empire in Barnardo’s photographs, see Lindsay Smith, “The Shoe-Black to the Crossing Sweeper: Victorian Street Arabs and Photography,” Textual Practice no. 10, 1 (1996): 29–55. On the photographs of the Williams children, see 41–45.

  105. Examination of George Collins, July 9, 1877, A/FWA/C/D10/3, COS Files and Papers.

  106. For a careful reconstruction of Merrick’s life, see Michael Howell and Peter Ford, The True History of the Elephant Man (New York: Penguin, 1980). Howell and Ford note that Merrick’s disabilities made him an ideal object of charity since he clearly could not support himself except as a freak. I develop this idea more fully in this section.

  107. The most sophisticated cultural analysis of Merrick is Peter Graham and Fritz Oehlschlaeger, Articulating the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick and his Interpreters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Graham and Oehlschlaeger approach Merrick’s story both through an analysis of transhistorical archetypes and through its relationship to other cultural developments in Victorian Britain.

  108. Wilfred Thomason Grenfell, A Labrador Doctor: The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1919), esp. ch. 4 on his time at the London Hospital. There are several good biographies of Grenfell which examine his work with poor youths in the London slums. See Ronald Rompkey, Grenfell of Labrador: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991) ch. 2; and J. Lennox Kerr, Wilfred Grenfell: His Life and Work (London: George G. Harrap, 1959), ch. 2.

  109. For Halsted’s perspective, see D. G. Halsted, Doctor in the Nineties (London: Christopher Johnson, 1959), ch. 2.

  110. Sir John Bland-Sutton, The Story of a Surgeon (London: Methuen, 1930), 139.

  111. Sir Frederick Treves, The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (London: Cassell and Company, 1923), 2–5.

  112. Ibid., 22.

  113. These photographs are reproduced in Howell and Ford’s True History of the Elephant Man.

  114. Treves, The Elephant Man, 36.

  115. As Edward Said concluded about Kipling’s depiction of the division between white and nonwhite: “A Sahib is a Sahib, and no amount of friendship or camaraderie can change the rudiments of racial difference.” See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993), 135. Likewise, Twain’s Prince and the Pauper (1881), while praising the wider vision the prince and the pauper acquire from their masquerades in one another’s clothes and lives, insists on the rightness of restoring each to his original station.

  116. Nadja Durbach demonstrates that Merrick’s body appeared in the “Register of Bodies Used for Anatomical Examination” but suggests that his corpse was not, per se, dissected. See Nadja Durbach, “Monstrosity, Masculinity, and Medicine: Re-Examining the Elephant Man,” unpublished paper in another’s possession. My thanks to Prof. Durbach for sharing her findings with me.

  117. In addition to scathing attacks in the press, the COS received many angry letters as well. Lt. Col. Richard Oldfield, for example, wrote to Ribton Turner on September 18, 1877, that he would influence his friends to “try and direct any monies they may be inclined to give to yr. society to Dr. Barnardo.” For this and other critical letters, see A/FWA/C/D10/2, COS Files and Papers.

  118. Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (October 28, 1877).

  119. On this aspiration, see G. M. Hicks to Ribton-Turner, August 14, 1877. A/FWA/C/D10/1, COS Files and Papers.

  120. COS Council Minute Book, entries for July 2–November 19, 1877, A/FWA/C/A1/5.

  121. This did not stop others from borrowing his techniques. For an account of the way an evangelical spinster, Miss Crimp, used photographs to promote her work, see “Visit to King Edward Industrial Schools,” Ragged School Union Magazine (April 1882), 67.

  122. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Education 1988), ch. 3.

  123. For a comprehensive analysis of this legacy, see Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), chs. 5 and 6. On street arabs, see Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School, and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), 160–164. See also Anna Davin, “Waif Stories in Late Nineteenth-Century England,” History Workshop Journal, 52 (Autumn 2001): 67–98.

  124. On Stead’s campaign and subsequent trial, see Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), chs. 3 and 4; on Stead within the context of campaigns against child abuse, see George Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982), 73–77.

  125. The Barnardos were so certain that the girls they saved would otherwise have become prostitutes that Mrs. Barnardo described girl streets waifs as “not yet fallen.” Sowing and Reaping, 11th Annual Report of East End Juvenile Mission (1877), xxxi.

  126. In the 1880s, debate over age-of-consent legislation in Britain and India was quite fierce. On the Indian context and its impact on British understandings of masculinity, see Mrinilina Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).

  127. For an example of the way one elite gay man in interwar Britain appropriated and reworked Barnardo’s visual lexicon to serve his own explicitly homoerotic (and not philanthropic) ends, see James Gardiner, A Class Apart: The Private Pictures of Montague Glover (London: Serpent�
��s Tail, 1992). From 1916 to the mid-50s, Glover assembled a vast archive of sexually revealing photographs of working-class boys and men, many of whom he photographed costumed in soldiers uniforms and in ragged clothes (their own or provided by him). The clothes of the ragged child and the soldier/sailor were interchangeable signifiers of fetishized male same-sex desire in Glover’s photographic rhetoric.

  128. See Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985). On Barnardo’s use of photographs as advertising tools, see Alec McHoul, “Taking the Children: Some Reflections at a Distance on the Camera and Dr. Barnardo,” Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (1991). George Reynolds used the phrase “making capital” in reference to Barnardo’s sale of photographs in Startling Revelations, 12.

  129. In her analysis of several different late-twentieth-century attempts to photograph destitute children in the United States, Julia Ballerini argues that despite the radical intentions of the photographers, their work individualizes poverty and reinforces rather than challenges the status quo. “Documentary photography, especially among the disadvantaged, has always been an ideological minefield…. It is easy for work to signify in ways contrary to those intended by its producers.” Julia Bellerini, “Photography as a Charitable Weapon: Poor Kids and Self-Representation,” Radical History Review (Fall, 1997): 169, 180.

  130. Carole Howlett, foreword, to Tink Palmer and Lisa Stacey, Stolen Childhood: Barnardo’s Work with Children Abused through Prostitution (London: Barnardo, 2002).

  131. Rachel Knott, “Questions and Answers, Abuse through Prostitution Advertising Campaign,” at www.barnardos.org.uk/AboutBarnardos/CampAdv/QA.html (Nov. 3, 2002). Controversy continues to surround Barnardo’s photographic practices even as this book moves into proofs. Its most recent campaign in late 2003 against childhood poverty featured a computer-generated advertisement depicting a baby with a cockroach crawling out of his mouth accompanied by the caption, “Baby Greg is one minute old. He should have a bright future. Poverty is waiting to rob Greg of hope and spirit and is likely to lead him to a future of squalor.” The advertisement was banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) after it received 466 complaints—the highest number received for an advertisement campaign in 2003. See John Carvel, “Child poverty adverts banned,” Guardian (December 10, 2003), http://society.guardian.co.uk/campaigning/story/0,8150,1103491,00.html. Undaunted by the ban, Campaign Magazine voted the advertisement one of the ten best of 2003.

  132. The campaign has been so successful that it has been invoked in parliamentary debates in Scotland to support the creation of the office of Commissioner for Children and Young People. See Proceedings of the Scottish Parliament, Wednesday, September 25, 2002, afternoon, Speech by Cathy Jamieson, the Minister for Education and Young People, column 14045.

  133. Edward Fuller, The Right of the Child: A Chapter in Social History (London: Victor Gollancz, 1951), 91–93.

  134. Save the Children, Focus on Images (London: Save the Children UK, 1994). The document was first published, but without photographic illustrations, in 1988. It has been revised several times, and according to staff at Save the Children, is once again under discussion and revision. According to Alan Thomas, photo librarian for Save the Children, the guidelines and pamphlet stimulated “many discussions” and “most aid agencies now have their own version of the guidelines.” Personal communication to author, July 19, 2001.

  135. Mrs. Barnardo and James Marchant, Memoirs of the Late Dr. Barnardo (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1907), 59.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE AMERICAN GIRL IN LONDON: GENDER, JOURNALISM, AND SOCIAL INVESTIGATION IN THE LATE VICTORIAN METROPOLIS

  1. “The Wares of Autolycus,” Pall Mall Gazette (November 22, 1893), 5. See G. R. Sims, “Mustard and Cress,” The Referee (November 19, 1893), 7.

  2. Ibid., (November 29, 1893), 5.

  3. Mary Billington, “Leading Lady Journalists,” Pearson’s Magazine (July 1896), 111.

  4. Mary Billington, “The Adventures of a Lady Journalist,” Young Woman (January 1899), 135.

  5. Elizabeth Banks, The Autobiography of a “Newspaper Girl” (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1902), 308, hereafter cited as Autobiography.

  6. A decade later, Banks’s fellow countryman, Jack London, also hired a photographer to illustrate his incognito escapades in the London slums for The People of the Abyss (New York: Macmillan, 1903). But London’s photographs included interiors of shelters, street scenes, and poses of him with “real” tramps. London’s images make much greater documentary claims than Banks’s, though obviously they could not have been taken at the time he was masquerading to be a tramp without revealing that he was not who he claimed to be.

  7. Banks discussed her photographs frequently with her literary agent, W. Morris Colles of the Authors’ Syndicate. Her interest in them was confined to their part in promoting publicity and sales of her books. See Elizabeth Banks to W. Morris Colles, December 6, 1893, box 1, folder 1; December 6, 1901, box 1, folder 2; March 13, 1902 and April 23, 1902, box 1, folder 3, Banks Papers.

  8. She claimed to have been born in 1870 and hence graduated from college at the exceptionally precocious age of 17, but census records strongly point to 1865 as her actual date of birth. See Jane Gabin, “Elizabeth Banks: An American on Fleet Street,” in her Introduction to a reprint of Elizabeth Banks, The Remaking of an American (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2000), xvi–xvii, and esp. note 1, xlvii. While Gabin’s useful essay notes several of Banks’s autobiographical inaccuracies, she nonetheless accepts most of what Banks wrote about herself as factual, rather than as literary performances intended to construct a persona. Gabin’s essay is the first published scholarly assessment of Banks, but it is marred by a variety of historical errors, such as dating the Paris Commune of 1870 in 1898 and placing Oscar Wilde’s trial in between the Spanish American and Boer Wars (it preceded both!)

  9. For example, just as James Greenwood insisted in “A Night” that he had braved the Lambeth Casual Ward by himself but had, in fact, been accompanied by his friend Bittlestone, so, too, Banks liked to emphasize her arrival in London as a friendless single girl. However, in an interview conducted in the autumn of 1894, we learn that she shared her “snug maisonette flat” with her sister, who had come to London sometime before Banks. See Marion Leslie, “ ‘An American Girl in London,’ An Interview with Miss Elizabeth Banks,” Young Woman (November 1894), 59.

  10. In the twilight of her career as a journalist in 1926 as Banks prepared to write a book on “democracy pure and undefiled,” she acknowledged her penchant for writing only partial truths. She told a fellow reporter without trace of apology that she was “going to print the whole truth for the first time in her life.” See “Women Who Figure in News of the Day,” the New York Sun, (November 15, 1926), clipping in Sun morgue file for Elizabeth Banks, held in the New York Public Library.

  11. Will of Elizabeth Banks, Somerset House, London.

  12. The largest collection consists of forty-six letters that Banks wrote to her literary agent detailing her negotiations for book contracts and deals, etc. See Elizabeth L. Banks Papers, University of Tulsa. See also Banks’s short note to Theodore Dreiser, whom she had met in New York, praising the “truths” of his Sister Carrie. Elizabeth Banks to Theodore Dreiser, February 25, 1908, Dreiser Papers, folder 381, Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania.

  13. Polly Pollock [Elizabeth Banks], “In an English Compartment Car,” Anglo-American Times (March 11, 1893), 200.

  14. Banks, Autobiography, 25–26, 212. See also Elizabeth L. Banks, “American ‘Yellow’ Journalism,” Nineteenth Century (August 1898), 333–334.

  15. Elizabeth Banks to W. Morris Colles, December 10, 1901, box 1, folder 2, Banks Papers.

  16. “She Is an American,” New York Daily Tribune (October 15, 1896), 5; American Woman’s Home Journal, Special Commencement Number (June 6, 1897), 9
.

  17. Ishbel Ross, Ladies of the Press (New York: Harper, 1936), 18.

  18. Marion Leslie, “An American Girl,” Young Woman (November 1894), 58.

  19. See Polly Pollock [Elizabeth Banks], Anglo-American Times (January 7, 1893), 61–62; and “Female Suicides,” Anglo-American Times (January 28, 1893), 109.

  20. She cut short her time working in a laundry because “Saturday brought me such weariness of the flesh that I decided I had better resign” before being fired. See Elizabeth Banks, Campaigns of Curiosity: Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in London (Chicago: F. T. Neely, 1894), 196, hereafter cited as Campaigns. Bank’s rediscovery by scholars in the past few years has led to the reprinting of her Campaigns with an introduction by Mary Suzanne Schriber and Abbey Zink. See Elizabeth Banks, Campaigns of Curiosity, Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in Late Victorian London (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).

  21. Banks, Autobiography, 220–221.

  22. Ibid., 222.

  23. William Allen White used the term “harpies” in his famous “What’s the Matter with Kansas” editorial of August 1896 in reference to the flamboyant platform speaking of the Populists’ star woman performer, the Kansan Mary Elizabeth Lease. See Michael Goldberg, Army of Women: Gender and Politics in Gilded Age Kansas (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); and Marily Dell Brady, “Populism and Feminism in a Newspaper by and for Women of the Kansas Farmer’s Alliance, 1891–1894” and June Underwood, “Civilizing Kansas: Women’s Organizations, 1880–1920” in Kansas History 7 (1984–85): 280–290, and 291–306.

  24. Elizabeth Banks, “Electioneering Women, An American Appreciation,” Nineteenth Century (November 1900), 791–794.

  25. “Women for Sound Money,” New York Sun (October 4, 1896), 4; see also “M’Kinley Women Rejoice,” New York Sun (November 8, 1896), 3.

  26. Polly Pollock [Elizabeth Banks], “My ‘At Home’ Day,” Anglo-American Times (April 8, 1893), 270.