by Koven, Seth
86. Elizabeth L. Banks, “How the Other Half Lives, The Crossing Sweeper,” English Illustrated Magazine (May 1894), 849.
87. Clementina Black, “Match-Box Making At Home,” English Illustrated Magazine (May 1892), 625–629. Black modestly did not inform readers about the significant role she had played in the summer of 1888 in helping her friend Annie Besant organize a strike by matchgirls employed at starvation wages by the firm of Bryant and May. In February 1888, Besant and William T. Stead had founded a weekly paper, the Link, “simply and solely as the helper of the helpless, the friend of the oppressed, and the advocate and champion of the cause of the ‘Disinherited our Race.’” Besant used her journalism not only to report abuses but as a way to organize supporters. On the editorial aims of the Link, see Annie Besant and William T. Stead, “To Our Fellow Servants,” Link (February 4, 1888), 1. On the role of the Link in the subsequent strike, see Besant’s articles for June and July 1888.
88. See Arwun Mohun, Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), esp. 119–125. See Patricia Malcolmson’s pioneering study of the industry, with its emphasis on married women’s work, “Laundresses and the Laundry Trade in Victorian England,” Victorian Studies 24 (Autumn 1981): 439–462. Activist women and workers were deeply divided among themselves over the virtues and vices of such forms of state legislation that “protected” workers and limited their hours without compensation for lost earnings. See Rosemary Feurer, “The Meaning of ‘Sisterhood’: The British Women’s Movement and Protective Labor Legislation, 1870–1900,” Victorian Studies 31 (Winter 1988): 233–260. See also Philippa Levine’s treatment of these debates among activist women in Victorian Feminism, 1850–1900 (Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University Press, 1987).
89. Skilled workers, Banks noted, who were paid weekly favored a state-mandated reduction in the working day from 12 to 10 hours. Workers paid by the piece defended their right to work longer hours to preserve their total wages.
90. Banks, Campaigns, 179.
91. These articles were quickly reprinted as two volumes, Tempted London: Young Men (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1888); and John Law [Margaret Harkness], ed., Toilers in London, or Inquiries Concerning Female Labour in the Metropolis (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1889). No individual is credited with editing the first volume, whereas the editor of the second volume is identified as the author of Out of Work. On the British Weekly and its editor, the Scottish minister William Robertson Nicholl, see Josef L. Altholz, The Religious Press in Britain, 1760–1900 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 63–64.
92. British Weekly: A Journal of Social and Christian Progress (February 24, 1888), 314; British Weekly (September 23, 1887).
93. Harkness to Webb, December 25, 1887, Passfield Papers.
94. Harkness’s friend Annie Besant had brilliantly organized and publicized the strike through her paper the Link.
95. See British Weekly (May 18, 1888, and July 20, 1888). See also the British Weekly discussion of female emigration to Australia on September 21, 1888, and Harkness’s recyling of the same material in Captain Lobe, on December 7, 1888, and December 14, 1888.
96. Thanks to the labors of a handful of literary scholars, Harkness has been rescued from her longtime status as the recipient of the letter in which Engels defined socialist aesthetics by criticizing Harkness’s depiction of the passivity of the poor. Led by Beate Kaspar, scholars have fleshed out a fuller picture of her life and suggested a variety of frameworks by which to understand her achievements. John Goode stresses her contribution to the socialist novel and her engagement as a novelist with the class-based political struggles of her day. Eileen Sypher argues that the force of Harkness’s political arguments was blunted by her commitment to conventional and conservative readers and heroines. Ingrid Von Rosenberg locates Harkness within the movement to adapt Zola’s French naturalism to the needs of the English socialist novel. Deborah Nord places her within a tradition of urban social exploration and within the emerging community of “glorified” spinsters seeking to define new social roles for themselves. See Beate Kaspar, Margaret Harkness: A City Girl (Tubingen: M. Niemeyer, 1984) and Kaspar’s and Joyce Bellamy’s detailed reconstruction of her life in the Dictionary of Labour Biography, vol. 8, (London: Macmillan, 1972), 103–113; Ingrid Von Rosenberg, “French Naturalism and the English Socialist Novel: Margaret Harkness and William Edwards Tirebuck,” in H. Gustav Klaus, ed., The Rise of Socialist Fiction, 1880–1914 (Brighton: Harvester, 1987); John Goode, “Margaret Harkness and the Socialist Novel,” and Kiernan Ryan, “Citizens of Centuries to Come: The Ruling-Class Rebel in Socialist Fiction,” in H. Gustav Klaus, ed., The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982); Eileen Sypher, Wisps of Violence: Producing Public and Private Politics in the Turn-of-the-Century British Novel (London: Verso, 1993), esp. ch. 6, “Margaret Harkness: Representing Politics in the Slums”; Bernadette Kirwan, introduction to Merlin Radical Fiction reprint of Out of Work; Peter Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1971), ch. 9; Deborah Nord, The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb and “Neither Pairs Nor Odd”: Female Community in Late-Nineteenth-Century London, Signs 15, no. 4: 733–754 and the incorporation of this article into her larger study, Walking the Victorian Streets (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).
97. These were the words Beatrice Potter used to describe her cousin in her diary entry for March 24, 1883. See The Diary of Beatrice Webb, Glitter Around and Darkness Within, 1873–1892, ed. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, vol 1 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 79.
98. Margaret Harkness to Beatrice Potter, December 10, 1875; September 1876; Passfield Papers, BLPES. Deborah Nord has noted Harkness’s ambivalent identification with feminist perspectives in “Neither Pairs Nor Odd” in Walking the Victorian Streets, 196–197.
99. One of Harkness’s biographers believes she may have had a romantic attachment to a married man. See Kaspar and Bellamy, Dictionary of Labour Biography, 110.
100. Consumed by grief at the death of his unnamed beloved, the doctor finds consolation and freedom in the slums where he spends “whole nights prowling about the street.” Because the book version of Captain Lobe is more readily available than its serialized form in the British Weekly, I will refer to the 1891 edition, which included an appreciative introduction by the founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth. See John Law [Margaret Harkness], In Darkest London, Captain Lobe (London: Bellamy Library, William Reeves, 1891), 82–83, 194.
101. “Our business,” the British Weekly declared, “will be, in the most delicate and reticent manner, to lay the facts before the Church” and to call upon churchmen and women to take action. See “Tempted London: Young Women,” British Weekly (April 13, 1888), 441.
102. See Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
103. Frederick Engels offered his oft-quoted definition of literary realism in response to Harkness’s City Girl: “Realism, to my mind, implies, besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances.” Engels to Harkness, April 1888, in Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, eds., Marx and Engels on Literature and Art: A Selection of Writings (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1973), 114–115. It was in this letter that Engels also expressed his disappointment at the way the London poor “passively submit [sic] to fate.” My thanks to Louise Yelin for this reference.
104. Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 121.
105. “Tempted London: Young Women. No. 1. Flower Girls,” British Weekly (May 4, 1888), 11.
106. Rudyard Kipling, Times (November 29, 1892), 8.
107. Elizabeth Banks, “On One Side Only. An American G
irl’s Reply to Mr. Kipling,” Times (December 6, 1892), 5.
108. See St. James’s Gazette (January 17, 1894).
109. See H. B. Marriott-Watson, “The American Woman,” Nineteenth Century (September 1904): 433–442.
110. Gertrude Atherton, “English and American Girls,” Woman at Home (October 1897), 42.
111. Matthew Arnold, “On Translating Homer,” in R. H. Super, ed., On the Classical Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 140.
112. See Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Angela Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
113. Elizabeth Banks, “American London,” in G. R. Sims, ed., Living London, vol. 2 (London: Cassell and Co., 1903), 112.
114. Mrs. H. R. Haweis, “The American Girl,” Young Woman (January 1894), 153–154.
115. C[ecil]. de Thierry, “American Women, From a Colonial Point of View,” Contemporary Review (October 1896): 522.
116. “War on American Women,” New York Sun (October 11, 1896), 7.
117. On Banks’s description of her interview with Li Hung Chang, see Elizabeth Banks, “The Women of England and America,” New York Herald (October 1896), sec. 6, p. 5. See also “She Is an American. The Wee Mite of a Woman Who Interviewed Li Hung Chang,” New York Daily Tribune (October 15, 1896), 5.
118. Elizabeth L. Banks, “The Women of England and America,” New York Herald (October 18, 1896), 5.
119. Elizabeth L. Banks, “The English Man Compared with the American Man. The Good Points of Both and Wherein Each Might Gain from Study of the Other,” New York Herald (October 25, 1896), 5.
120. Elizabeth Banks, “Self-Help Among American College Girls,” Nineteenth Century (March 1896), 502–513.
121. Marion Leslie, “Interview”, 62.
122. Banks, “American ‘Yellow’ Journalism.”
123. Hugh E. M. Stutfield, “The Psychology of Feminism,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 161 (January 1897): 114–115.
124. Elizabeth Banks, “The American Negro and His Place,” Nineteenth Century (September 1899), 459–474.
125. Celia [Elizabeth Banks], “People One Meets, Walking Lima’s Streets,” Oshkosh Weekly Northwestern (May 5, 1890), 8.
126. Banks, “The American Negro and His Place,” 467–468. On an Indian woman’s experiences in late Victorian women’s colleges, see Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), ch. 3.
127. Banks, “The American Negro and His Place,” 459–460, 474.
128. It was presumably through this association that she became close friends with Edith Lees Ellis, a former member of the Fellowship of the New Life and lesbian wife of Havelock Ellis. She calls Ellis, “Mrs. Havie.” See Banks, Remaking of an American, 8.
129. I am borrowing the phrase from Antoinette Burton, “Making a Spectacle of Empire: Indian Travelers in Fin-de-Siècle London,” History Workshop Journal 42 (1996): 96–117.
130. Unsigned review of Autobiography of a ‘Newspaper Girl,’ Nation (December 25, 1902).
131. Unsigned review, “Campaigns of Curiosity,” Pall Mall Gazette (September 25, 1894), 4.
132. See Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women, Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907–14 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
133. See Olive Christian Malvery, The Soul Market with Which Is Included ‘The Heart of Things’ (London: Hutchinson, 1907). See Judith Walkowitz’s analysis of Malvery’s manipulation of race and gender categories in her journalism and photographs, “The Indian Woman, the Flower Girl, and the Jew: Photojournalism in Edwardian London,” Victorian Studies 42 (Fall 1998). Walkowitz examines Malvery’s manipulation of commercial venues for her work and contrasts the different ways in which she represented working girls, Jews, and other “aliens” in her writing and photographs as part of a broader crisis in liberalism.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE POLITICS AND EROTICS OF DIRT: CROSS-CLASS SISTERHOOD IN THE SLUMS
1. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (London: Harpers and Brothers, 1933; 2d. ed., New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1961), 9.
2. Many scholars in recent years have examined women’s engagement with slum reform and investigation. See Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Deborah Nord, Walking the Streets, Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) and The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), esp. chs. 5 and 6; Ross McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1990), ch. 6; Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (London: Virago, 1985); Jane Lewis, Women and Social Action in Victorian and Edwardian England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); Eileen Yeo, The Contest for Social Science: Relations and Representations of Gender and Class (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996); and Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
3. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, eds., The Diary of Beatrice Webb, vol. 1 Glitter Around and Darkness Within, 1873–1892, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 132; Margot Asquith, An Autobiography, vol. 1 (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1920), 108–116. See Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, ch. 2 on shopping and slumming as expressions of women’s new freedoms to move through urban space in the 1880s; see also Erica Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), esp. introduction, “To Walk Alone in London.”
4. The word “queer” appears constantly in both novels. It often means nothing more than “odd” or “unusual.” But on other occasions it is freighted with subtle sexual connotations. In the text of this essay, I have cited several examples from Miss Brown. In A Princess of the Gutter, Joan’s cousin Anne, a passionate musician, is uncomfortable with talk of marriage and feminine banter. Joan invites Anne to join her in her new slum residence in Shoreditch, but Anne is not yet ready to leave her conventional bourgeois home. Anne “wrenched her hands out of mine, and left me. She had already got back into her shell, and it was impossible for me to touch her or influence her in any way. Nevertheless, during the night which followed, my last night in the old house, I thought of Anne and her triumphant march [a piano piece] with a queer sense of excitement and pleasure” (114). By the novel’s end, Anne and Joan are ensconced together as “sisters” in the slums. “Queer” linked with “pleasure” in this passage seems to convey some element of attraction that goes beyond its standard meaning of “unusual.” This suggests that “queer” had begun to acquire its homoerotic connotations well before 1900. On the meaning of the word “queer” in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (New York: Vintage Books, 1886), see Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), 112.
5. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1966), 159. See also Patricia Yaeger’s brilliant analysis of dirt, race, gender, and sexuality in Southern women’s fiction in Dirt and Desire, Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), esp. ch. 6.
6. After providing a graphic description of urban vice and physical squalor, Kay literally halts his narrative because he is “unwilling to weary the patience of the reader by extending such disgusting details.” See J. P. Kay, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, Second Edition Enlarged and Containing an Introductory Letter to the Rev. Thomas Chalmers (London: James Ridgway, 1832), 37.
7. Mary Higgs, Glimpses into the Abyss (London: P. S. King and Son, 1906), 20.
8. See Derek Hudson, Munby, Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur J. Munby, 1828–1910 (London: J. Murray, 1972), 89–90; Liz Stanley, ed., The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant (London: Virago, 1984); L. Davidoff, “Class and Gender in Victorian Britain,” in J. K. Newton, ed., Sex and Class in Women’s History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); G. Pollock, “‘With My Own Eyes’: Fetishism, the Labouring Body, and the Colour of its Sex,” Art History 17 (September 1994): 342–382; Ann McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). See also, Diane Atkinson, Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick (London: Macmillan, 2003).
9. Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830– 1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. chs. 3–6.
10. John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, paragraph 86. For an extended analysis of the gender and sexual politics of Lilies in relationship to women’s social work in the slums, see Seth Koven, “How the Victorians Read Sesame and Lilies,” in Deborah Nord, ed., John’s Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Unlike Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, who suggest that by the 1840s and ’50s, separate spheres ideology produced fixed lines of gender division in the middle class, I stress the ways in which the ideology and practice of separate spheres both permitted and required women to bring their “private” values into “public” life. See Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, introduction to part 3, of Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 319. While Davidoff and Hall argue that “only gradually did private functions retreat to a hidden core” (319), they also recognize the public character of middle-class women’s philanthropic endeavors (416–436).
