Slumming

by Koven, Seth

  11. J. H. Stallard, The Female Casual and Her Lodging with a Complete Scheme for the Regulation of Workhouse Infirmaries (London: Saunders, Otley, and Co., 1866) 1, 2, 6, (hereafter cited as Stallard, Female Casual). This remarkable book consists of Dr. Stallard’s introductory materials and conclusions along with a narrative of her incognito visits to the casual ward by Ellen Stanley, one of many pseudonyms assumed by the pauper widow. The narrative was heavily edited to make its language and images acceptable for a respectable reading public.

  12. Stallard, Female Casual, 48, 49. On male sexual threats, see pp. 7, 52–53.

  13. See chapter 3 for an extended analysis of women’s incognito investigations in the 1880s and ’90s.

  14. On higher education, see Rita McWilliams Tullberg, Women at Cambridge: A Men’s University, though of a Mixed Type (London: Gollancz, 1975); on women and local government, see Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in Local English Government, 1865–1914 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

  15. In the September 1888 issue of the Nineteenth Century Beatrice Potter created a sensation with the publication of her “Pages of a Workgirl’s Diary,” a vivid record of her experiences masquerading as a trouser fitter and Jewess in a sweated workshop in East London, which she later dismissed as a “lark” and “romantic adventure.” See Sarah Tooley, “The Growth of a Socialist, an Interview with Mrs. Sidney Webb,” The Young Woman (February 1895), 148.

  16. Katharine [Symonds] Furse, Hearts and Pomegranates: The Story of Forty-Five Years, 1875–1920 (London: Peter Davies, 1940), 156.

  17. “Overdoing It,” Punch (December 22, 1883), 294.

  18. Mary Higgs, Glimpses into the Abyss (London: P. S. King, 1906), x, 83.

  19. Ibid., 94, 108–109, 113, 120.

  20. See Mrs. Higgs’s testimony of November 29, 1904, Report of the Department Committee on Vagrancy, Minutes of Evidence, vol. 2, Cd. 2891 (1906), 53.

  21. Muriel Lester, letter no. 14, October 7–14, 1926, in Box 1, “Correspondence and form letters written from India,” Lester Papers.

  22. Kingsley Royden, “A Friend in My Retreat: Family Life in Bromley St. Leonard between the Wars,” East London Record, no. 1 (1978).

  23. Hulda Friederichs, “I Was In Prison—The Story of Miss Honnor Morten’s Wonderful Work,” The Young Woman (May 1900), 304.

  24. Muriel Lester, It Occurred to Me (London: Harper and Brothers, 1937), 4–7, 20–23, 89.

  25. For a balanced assessment of these activities, see George Behlmer, Friends of the Family: The English Home and its Guardians, 1850–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), ch. 1. Behlmer’s interpretation, while acknowledging the role of cross-class friendship, stresses the regulatory and disciplinary aspect of relationships between female sanitarians and the poor.

  26. Eighteen Years in the Central City Swarm, n.d. (c. 1912), 34.

  27. E. A. Pope, untitled article, Monthly Record of the Bermondsey Settlement and St. George’s Social Club (May 1902), 76. At the time the stories she recounts actually occurred, Pope was still Miss E. A. Barrs.

  28. Muriel Wragge, The London I Loved: Reminiscences of Fifty Years Social Work in the District of Hoxton (London: J. Clarke, 1960), 83.

  29. Alice Hodson, Letters from a Settlement (London: E. Arnold, 1909), 12–15. A graduate of Lady Margaret Hall, Hodson worked at the college’s settlement in South London with a boys’ club at Waterloo Crypt. She noted that her father believed that a woman’s sphere should be the home but also believed his daughter should be well informed and educated. Katherine Roberts shared Hodson’s repulsion from and attraction to the dirtiness of her work among the poor. Roberts served as a nurse in a London Maternity Hospital for poor women. She wondered “why in Heaven’s name can’t they [the management of the hospital] get charwomen to do all the work? No wonder ladies don’t often go in for this branch of [nursing] profession.” Roberts regularly fled in a hansom cab to the comforts of tea and cakes, strawberries and cream with her friend “E” when she felt overwhelmed by her nursing duties. Like Hodson, Roberts also relished the signs of her violation of convention norms of gentile femininity and her rebellion against social convention. See Katherine Roberts, Five Months in a London Hospital (Letchworth: Garden City Press, 1911), 9, 18.

  30. Ellen Ranyard’s London Bible and Domestic Female Mission challenged this hierarchy by recruiting her Bible women and Bible Nurses from the churchgoing poor. Ranyard Bible Nurses themselves performed dirty labor for other working class women—scrubbing their homes and bodies in times of illness. See Frank Prochaska, “Body and Soul: Bible Nurses and the Poor in Victorian London,” Historical Research 60 (1987): 336–348.

  31. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), 154.

  32. The founder of London’s most renowned crèche, the evangelical Quaker Marie Hilton complained “that I sometimes read articles about the sin and vice of the East End, written by people who do not look below the surface, and cannot see the fine gold amid the dross. In spite of the pollution incident to the condition of the neighbourhood, many strive, and strive not in vain, to keep themselves unspotted from the world.” See John Deane, Marie Hilton: Her Life and Work, 1821–1896 (London: Isbister and Company Limited, 1897), 90.

  33. On the body and image of the prostitute as a site of dirt and disease, see Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 118–134.

  34. E. S., “Women Who Ought to Work,” Eastward-Ho (May 1885), 50–51.

  35. Recent scholarly work on Loane suggests that the author “M. Loane” was not a single person, but was Loane, a well-published Queen’s nurse, and her halfsister, Alice Ezra Loane. See introduction by Susan Cohen and Clive Fleay in M. Loane, The Queen’s Poor: Life as They Find It in Town and Country (London: E. Arnold, 1905; facs. repr. London: Middlesex University Press, 1998). For a critical assessment of Loane’s biases, see George Behlmer, Friends of the Family: The English Home and its Guardians, 1850–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 52–56.

  36. M. Loane, The Next Street But One (London: E. Arnold, 1907), 99–100.

  37. Another graduate of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, Winifred Locket, noted angrily that the indiscriminant charity of West End ladies had encouraged the poor in her neighborhood to cultivate “an appearance of poverty even if it was not there.” Unpublished autobiographical manuscript, Winifred Locket, “Reminiscences,” Lady Margaret Hall Settlement.

  38. Joseph Williamson, Father Joe: The Autobiography of Joseph Williamson (New York: Abingdon Press, 1963), 41.

  39. For an analysis of the way class divided women’s attitudes toward mothering, see Jane Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England, 1900–1939 (London: Croom Helm, 1980).

  40. Maude Royden, Bid Me Discourse, unpublished autobiography, ff. 18/19. Fawcett Library, London. On Royden, see Sheila Fletcher, Maude Royden: A Life (New York, NY: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Jane Addams also noted the ways in which the hands of the poor served as unforgettable markers of their plight in Twenty Years at Hull-House (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999), 70.

  41. On Langridge’s work, see Sister Gertrude, Mother Edith, O.M.S.E.: a Memoir (Beaconsfield, UK: Darwen Finlayson, 1964). See also Janet Courtney, The Women of My Time (London: Hogarth, 1934), 104–106.

  42. Muriel Lester, Kill or Cure (Nashville: Cokesbury Press, 1937), 11.

  43. In the aftermath of her husband’s death, the wealthy and radical Charlotte Despard decided to live among the poor in the Nine Elms section of south London in 1891. Her years there, and in particular her poor-law visiting and work in Lambeth propelled her toward socialism and feminism. See Andro Linklater, An Unhusbanded Life, Charlotte Despard: Suffragette, Socialist, and Sinn Feiner (London: Hutchinson, 1980), esp. chs. 4 and 5.

  44. Katharine Bruce Glasier put the matter well: “To be willing to live ‘clean’ oneself in ai
ry, spacious dwellings, and to do nothing to help cleanse the world for others is simply to be ‘unclean’ in soul.” See Glasier, “The Labour Woman’s Battle with Dirt” in Marion Phillips, ed., Women and the Labour Party (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1918).

  45. Martin’s feminist politics were quite idiosyncratic, neither identifiably socialist nor Labourite.

  46. Martin was tied to Cambridge intellectual circles through her eminent brother-in-law, Professor James Ward, the philosopher and psychologist.

  47. Anna Martin, “The Married Working Woman,” Nineteenth Century (December 1910), 1107.

  48. Susan Pedersen contexualizes Martin’s proposals within a broad range of social policy alternatives. See Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 44–45. Martin figures prominently in Ellen Ross’s sensitive analysis of elite women’s slum philanthropy. See Ross, Love and Toil, esp. ch. 7.

  49. See Seth Koven, “Borderlands: Women, Voluntary Action, and Child Welfare in Britain, 1840–1914,” in Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993).

  50. On women social explorers and reformers, see Jane Lewis’s perceptive comparison of Helen Dendy Bosanquet and Beatrice Potter Webb, “The Place of Social Investigation, Social Theory and Social Work in the Approach to Late Victorian and Edwardian Social Problems: The Case of Beatrice Webb and Helen Bosanquet,” in Martin Bulmer, Kevin Bales, and K. K. Sklar, eds., The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); A. M. McBriar, An Edwardian Mixed Doubles: The Bosanquets versus the Webbs: A Study in British Social Policy, 1890–1929 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

  51. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986), 2.

  52. All historians of dirt are deeply indebted to the perceptive and much-cited work of Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (New York: Praeger, 1966). My work also reflects the influence of Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s pioneering articles collected in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1985).

  53. Miss Edith M. Sing, What Do We Mean by a Women’s Settlement (Liverpool, 1897), 6, pamphlet, Widener Library, Harvard University.

  54. Maude Stanley, Work about Five Dials (London: Macmillan, 1878), 6–7.

  55. Margaret Nevinson, Life’s Fitful Fever: A Volume of Memories (London: A. and C. Black, 1926), 80.

  56. Olive Schreiner to Edward Carpenter, in Richard Rive, ed., Olive Schreiner Letters, vol. 1, 1871–1899 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

  57. See Ruth Brandon, The New Women and the Old Men (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), ch. 2, esp. 74, and Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, ch. 5, on this “romance.”

  58. Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, Diary of Beatrice Webb, vol. 1, entry for April 1884, 115. See Deborah Nord’s compelling interpretation of Potter’s relationship with Chamberlain and its relationship to her philanthropic and literary work in The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb. On Schreiner’s and Potter’s attempts to stifle their own sexual needs in favor of social altruism, see Janet Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 216–221.

  59. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, The Diary of Beatrice Webb, vol. 1, 132.

  60. Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (New York: Dutton, 1978), 231.

  61. Pycroft to Potter, July 6, 1886, Passfield Papers. On the role of gossip in working-class life, see Melanie Tebbutt, Women’s Talk? A Social History of ‘Gossip’ in Working-Class Neighbourhoods, 1880–1960 (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1995).

  62. Pycroft to Potter, October 8, 1886, Passfield Papers.

  63. Mary Talbot recalled that the working-class girls with whom she worked could not believe that she did not have a “young man” and rejected her reply that she intended to be “an old maid.” Mary Talbot, “Women’s Settlements,” Economic Review (October 1895): 498. Likewise, the local poor hoped that the spinster rent collector Ellen Chase would “soon have a handsome husband, and a happy married life.” Ellen Chase, Tenant Friends in Old Deptford, with a preface by Octavia Hill (London: Williams and Norgate, 1929), 69.

  64. The Monthly Record of Bermondsey Settlement and the St. George’s Social Club, (October 1903), 101.

  65. Ibid. (May 1896), 53.

  66. Ibid. (October 1898), 103.

  67. H. M. Hyndman, Record of an Adventurous Life (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911), 51.

  68. The Monthly Record of the Bermondsey Settlement and the St. George’s Social Club (February 1907), 18.

  69. For an example of this anxiety, see Mrs. Maitland, speech at annual meeting, Fourth Annual Report (1891), 8, Women’s University Settlement.

  70. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, My Part in a Changing World (London: V. Gollancz, 1938), 67, 72.

  71. Rev. Free, “Settlements or Unsettlements,” Nineteenth Century (March 1908), 377–378. Nina Auerbach insightfully provides a framework for interpreting Free’s strident remarks. She argues that the “Victorian old maid claims her place among the angels, not in their self-negation, but in their militant and dangerous potential to reverse life’s comfortably familiar order.” See Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 117.

  72. Winifred Locket, “Recollections of L.[ady] M.[argaret] H.[all] S[ettlement],” c. 1956, Lady Margaret Hall Settlement Papers.

  73. Vicinus, Independent Women, 290.

  74. Anna R. Tillyard, Second Annual Report, Canning Town Women’s Settlement, 17.

  75. There are no writings by women—published or unpublished—comparable to the sexually frank diaries and letters of J. A. Symonds, C. R. Ashbee, or Lytton Strachey; and no transcripts of “sexual” trials of women comparable to the cases of Bolton and Park, Cleveland Street, and Oscar Wilde, which have proved such rich sources in reconstructing the history of male same-sex desire.

  76. This is historian Susan Pedersen’s explanation for the nature of the surviving Rathbone papers and archives. Pedersen is completing a new biography of Rathbone. Private communication with author.

  77. For this reason, Martha Vicinus, author of many pioneering essays on same-sex erotics, largely ignores sexuality in her fine treatment of women’s settlement houses in London. See Vicinus, Independent Women, ch. 6.

  78. On the relationship of purity and feminism, see Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Sexuality and the Early Feminists (London: Penguin, 1995). Bland emphasizes the normality and acceptability of passionate same-sex friendships. See p. 120.

  79. See Sheila Jeffreys’s use of novels in The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880–1930 (London: Pandora Press, 1985), ch. 6.

  80. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence acknowledged the powerful impact of novels about social problems on the emergence of her engagement with social issues. She recalled that Walter Besant’s The Children of Gibeon “made a profound impression and lived in my mind continuously.” See Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, My Part in a Changing World (London: V. Gollancz, 1938), 67. Mary Higgs condemned modern novels, with their “coloured picture of life” and exaggerated emphasis on sex for contributing to female immorality and destitution (Glimpses, 318) and instead believed that the solution to female vagrancy “belongs to womanhood to befriend womanhood” (323).

  81. Muriel Lester, Kill or Cure (Nashville: Cokesbury Press, 1937), 13.

  82. Vernon Lee, Miss Brown, A Novel (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1884); L. T. Meade, A Princess of the Gutter (New York and London: G. P. Putnam, 1896). There is a growing body of work on Lee. The work most closely related to my own is by Diana Maltz, who first set me thinking about Lee at the outset of my book project. See Diana Maltz, “Engaging Delicate Brains: From Working-Class Enculturation to Upper-Class Lesbian Liberation in Vernon Lee’s and Kit
Anstruther-Thomson’s Psychological Aesthetics,” in Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades, eds., Women and British Aestheticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 211–229. The two major biographies of Lee are Peter Gunn, Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856–1935 (London: Oxford Univesity Press, 1964); and Burdett Gardner, The Lesbian Imagination (Victorian Style), A Psychological and Critical Study of “Vernon Lee” (New York: Garland, 1987), which is a facsimile print of the author’s 1954 doctoral dissertation. Scholarly articles on Lee are proliferating and include Adeline Tintner, “Vernon Lee’s Oke of Okehurst,” in Studies in Short Fiction 28, no. 3 (1991): 355–362; Ruth Robbins, “Vernon Lee: Decadent Woman?” in John Stokes, ed., Fin de Siècle/Fin du Globe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992); Phyllis Mannocchi, “Vernon Lee and Kit Anstruther-Thomson: A Study of Love and Collaboration between Two Romantic Friends,” Women’s Studies 12, no. 2 (1986): 129–148.

  83. It is not entirely clear that Lee’s origins were as exotic as she claimed. Peter Gunn suggests that her father fabricated his Russian origins. See Gunn, Vernon Lee.

  84. James penned many short portraits of Lee in his letters. See Rayburn Moore, ed., Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 46.

  85. Vernon Lee to her mother, June 20, 1881, in Irene Cooper Willis, ed., Vernon Lee’s Letters (privately printed, 1937), 65.

  86. Vernon Lee, Countess of Albany (London: Allen and Co., 1884), 291.

  87. Lee immediately became persona non grata with the Morris’s and Rossetti’s, who quite rightly recognized themselves in Lee’s characterization of their art, poetry, and romances with lower-class girls.

  88. Lee, Countess of Albany, 282.

  89. Vernon Lee, Euphorion (London: T. F. Unwin, 1884), 8, 13.

  90. Lee, Countess of Albany, 303.

  91. Ellis and Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1897; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1975), 200, 221.

  92. Vernon Lee, diary fragment, 1884, Vernon Lee Papers. On the use of the word morbid, see John Stokes, In the Nineties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).