Slumming

by Koven, Seth

  93. Vernon Lee to her mother, July 23, 1885, in Willis, Vernon Lee’s Letters (1937), 181.

  94. Vernon Lee, diary fragment, 1883, Vernon Lee Papers.

  95. Terry Castle, “Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Counterplot of Lesbian Fiction,” in Joseph Bristow, ed., Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing (London: Routledge, 1992), 134.

  96. Lee, who knew John Addington Symonds well through her companion Mary Robinson, must have been familiar with Symonds’s work on Michaelangelo’s sexual passion for men. She also was familiar with Michaelangelo’s masculinized female nudes of the Medici tomb.

  97. On Sacha’s perverse sexuality, see Ronald Pearsall, Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969) 484– 485; on vampirism and dissident female sexuality, see Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), ch. 10; and Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

  98. Hamlin’s divided self anticipates Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  99. Kathy Psomiades, “‘Still Burning from this Strangling Embrace’: Vernon Lee on Desire and Aesthetics” in Richard Dellamora, ed., Victorian Sexual Dissidence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 26.

  100. Here, I am modifying Linda Dowling’s subtle analysis of the relationship of male homosexuality and hellenism. Dowling contends that the coded language used to express same-sex desire “does not operate as a simple inversion of the dominant discourse,” but instead assumes a “discontinuous and constantly shifting relationship to the discourse of the dominant group” whose discourse is itself unstable. Linda Dowling, “Ruskin’s Pied Beauty and the Constitution of a ‘Homosexual Code,’” Victorian Newsletter 75 (1989): 1–8; see also her extended study, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

  101. Toynbee Hall, with its own tradition of tolerating sexual dissidence, was among her favorite slum destinations. See Willis, Vernon Lee’s Letters, 341–342.

  102. Vernon Lee to her mother, August 26, 1893, ibid., 362–363.

  103. The dedication reads, “To Henry James I Dedicate, for Good Luck, My First Attempt at a Novel.” The description of James’s kindness comes from a letter Vernon Lee wrote to her mother in July 1884. See Willis, Vernon Lee’s Letters, 155. James’s relationship to Lee and Miss Brown was the subject of a series of articles and notes in the PMLA in 1953/54. See Carl Weber, “Henry James and His Tiger Cat,” and Burdett Gardner, “An Apology for Henry James’s ‘Tiger Cat,’” in PMLA 68 (Sept. 1953): 672–687; and Leon Edel, “Henry James and Vernon Lee,” PMLA 69 (June 1954).

  104. Henry James to T. S. Perry, December 12, 1884, in Leon Edel, ed., Henry James Letters, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1980), 61. Lee was not the only author to dedicate a novel to James that explored morbid sexual themes. Howard Overing Sturgis dedicated his 1891 novel, Tim, about the love of two Eton boys for one another, to James. James condemned the book and refused to communicate with its author. See Timothy D’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest (London: Routledge, 1970), 8.

  105. Henry James to Vernon Lee, May 10, 1885, in Edel, Henry James Letters, vol. 3, 84–87.

  106. See Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (New York: Penguin, 1985), 171, 427. A substantial body of literary criticism analyzes the theme of “homosexual panic” in James’s writings, much of it inspired by Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). See also, “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic,” in Ruth Yeazell, ed., Sex, Politics and Science in the Nineteenth Century Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

  107. The fullest analysis of “marginal masculinity” in James’s Princess is Kelly Cannon, Henry James and Masculinity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), esp. 45–47 and 94–95. Cannon underscores Hyacinth’s refusal of both masculine aggression and the consummation of heterosexuality through marriage.

  108. “Mrs. L. T. Meade at Home,” Sunday Magazine 23 (1894), 616.

  109. “How I Write My Books. An Interview with Mrs. L. T. Meade,” The Young Woman 1 (1892–93), 122.

  110. Sally Mitchell argues that by the mid-1870s Meade “had many of the characteristics that would make her a New Woman when the term became popular in the 1890s.” See The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 10. Mitchell interprets Meade’s various names somewhat differently than I do.

  111. Helen Black, Pen, Pencil, Baton and Mask, Biographical Sketches (London: Spottiswoode, 1896), 226–227.

  112. L. T. Meade, “A Peep at the Pioneer Club,” Young Woman 4 (1895–96), 304, as quoted in Sally Mitchell, The New Girl, 10. On the Pioneer Club and, more generally, the institutions supporting activist women in the 1890s, see David Rubinstein’s judicious study Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in the 1890s (London: Harvester, 1986), 222–25.

  113. On the complexities of women’s names and their social identities, see Kali Israel, Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  114. Soon after its creation, Meade reported the aims of the SPCC in an article to the periodical devoted to philanthropy in East London, Eastward Ho! See L. T. Meade, “London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children,” Eastward Ho! (May 1885).

  115. Scamp and I (London: John F. Shaw, 1892) chronicles the adventures of two street urchins, Flo and Dick, and their dog, Scamp, who is stolen and fated to be used in a vicious dog fight. It features several women philanthropists associated with Miss Octavia Hill’s Courts (91).

  116. L. T. Meade, “Story Writing for Girls,” The Academy and Literature Fiction Supplement (November 7, 1903), 499.

  117. “Mrs. L. T. Meade at Home,” 620.

  118. As Sally Mitchell has shown, the “girl culture” Meade helped to create through her novels and journalism celebrated the passionately affectionate homosocial worlds of girls’ schools and women’s colleges and settlement houses. Although Mitchell acknowledges the suggestion of homoeroticism in Meade’s novels, she ultimately argues that such psychosexual interpretations would impose a modern sensibility on how Victorian girls read and understood Meade. Mitchell, New Girl, ch. 6, esp. 164–168.

  119. There are dozens of these sort of comic references to the need of spinsters to find a man. See Ellen Chase, Tenant Friends in Old Deptford (London: Williams & Norgate, 1929), 68–69.

  120. The term “rough gel” never achieved the popularity or homoerotic valences of its masculine counterpart, “rough lad.” On the meaning of the later, see Seth Koven, “Rough Lads and Hooligans,” in Andrew Parker et al., eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992).

  121. By the 1930s, some female reformers were able to look back on the relationships they had witnessed in their youth at women’s colleges and settlements and see them in sexual terms.

  122. I analyze this scene and Harkness’s social scientific, journalistic, and novelistic writings about poverty in “Converting East London: Sexuality, Salvationism, and Jewishness in Victorian East London.” Paper presented at the Mid-Atlantic Conference of British Studies, March 2000, New York, NY.

  123. Wragge, The London I Loved, 13.

  124. Martha Vicinus, “Distance and Desire: English Boarding School Friendships, 1870–1920,” Signs 9 (1984): 600–622.

  125. There are many subtle homoerotic scenes, such as the moment when Joan lets down her gorgeous chestnut hair for Martha’s benefit (131) or Martha’s passionate declaration of love for Joan from her sickbed. As Joan nurses Martha during her illness, Martha proclaims, “I love you Jo-an; I think o’ you day and night. There ain’t nothing I wouldn’t do for you—nothing—nothing” (185).

  126. Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex (London: G. Allen, 1912), 13, 72.

  127. As Carroll Smith-Ros
enberg observed, Havelock Ellis also noted the connection between emancipated women and lesbianism in Sexual Inversion. See “Discourses of Sexuality and Subjectivity: The New Woman, 1870–1936” in Disorderly Conduct (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1985).

  128. My thanks to Martha Vicinus for suggesting the way Meade worked within this particular genre of writing about girls.

  129. Athenaeum (October 17, 1896), 522.

  130. Mitchell, New Girl, 21.

  131. Saturday Review (November 30, 1895), 714.

  132. See Gay Wachman, Lesbian Empire: Radical Crosswriting in the Twenties (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001).

  133. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929), ch. 5, para. 1.

  134. Roy Devereux [Mrs. Roy Pember-Devereux], The Ascent of Woman (London: John Lane, 1896), 58–59, 64.

  135. The struggle over the representation of women in suffrage debates is brilliantly analyzed in Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), part 4, “Representation.”

  136. On the connections between dirt, domesticity, and domestic sciences in the United States, see Lynne Vallone’s excellent essay, “‘The True Meaning of Dirt’: Putting Good and Bad Girls in Their Place(s),” in Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone, eds., The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994). On the emergence of women’s scientific social work in Germany as a profession for middle-class women, especially Jewish women, see Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), ch. 7.

  137. For a sample of the syllabi of courses taught in sociology and in home economics, see Calendar of King’s College [London], 1897–98, section on Department for Ladies, Kensington Square, 292–345. The department was later renamed King’s College for Women. My thanks to Molly Sutphen for sending me copies of these calendars for several years.

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

  139. Some few women, such as Beatrice Potter Webb, claimed for themselves the masculine privileges of the sociologist, but Webb consistently saw herself as an exceptional woman whose intellectual prowess entitled her to play a leading role in a variety of otherwise all-male political and intellectual settings.

  140. Elmy to Harriet McIlquham, May 18, 1898, ff. 212, ms. 47451, Elmy Papers.

  141. Not all female social workers supported such measures. An important minority associated with the Charity Organisation Society remained quite hostile to such infringements on family life. Catherine Davies, a member of a London County Council Care Committee in south London, was appointed to visit the homes of families receiving free meals under the act. She was quite critical of the act and its promotion of an unnatural dependence on the state in a report published in the Charity Organisation Review. See Catherine Davies, “Problems of Charity. Care Committee Home Visiting,” Charity Organisation Review (April 1908), 218–219. For another interpretation of state welfare as a misguided and dangerous solution to “dirt” in poor women’s lives, see Helen Dendy Bosanquet’s many books, including Rich and Poor (London: Macmillan, 1896).

  142. Miss A. T. Thompson, “National and Municipal Demands for Local Voluntary Work,” Charity Organisation Review (July 1914), 48; see also Clara Grant’s description of the transformation of her unofficial and voluntary work into an official function of the London County Council in Farthing Bundles (London: A. & E. Walter, 1931), 80–81. See Ellen Ross, “‘Human Communion’ or a Free Lunch: School Dinners in Victorian and Edwardian London,” in J. B. Schneewind, ed., Giving: Western Ideas of Philanthropy (Bloomington, IN: University of Indian Press, 1996), 179–198 on the transformation of female-dominated care committees from private philanthropic to municipal bodies with the creation of the London County Council Care Committees.

  143. Aldous Huxley, foreword (1946) to Brave New World (New York: Harper and Row, 1939; Bantam Modern Classic Edition, 1968), vii.

  144. Wragge, The London I Loved, 53.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE “NEW MAN” IN THE SLUMS: RELIGION, MASCULINITY, AND THE MEN’S SETTLEMENT HOUSE MOVEMENT

  1. Rev. Montagu Butler, “Love the Brotherhood,”Oxford Magazine (October 31, 1883), 344.

  2. Rev. Brooke Lambert, “The Outcast Poor. 1. Esau’s Cry,” Contemporary Review (December 1883), 916.

  3. Samuel Barnett, “The Failure of Philanthropy,” Macmillan’s Magazine (March 1896), 396.

  4. Historians have examined the contributions of male settlement house residents (most often called settlers) to social policy, philanthropy, and the church’s mission to the poor. See Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Standish Meacham, Toynbee Hall and the Search for Community (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); Asa Briggs and Anne Macartney; Toynbee Hall: The First Hundred Years (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1984); Hugh McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1974); Kenneth Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1963); on Toynbee Hall and art, see Frances Borzello, Civilising Caliban: The Misuse of Art, 1875–1980 (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1987); and Peter D’Alroy Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival: Religion, Class, and Social Conscience in Late Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). The best analysis of Toynbee Hall remains Emily Klein Abel, “Canon Barnett and the First Thirty Years of Toynbee Hall” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1969). The work of David McIlhiney pays close attention to the religious differences between Toynbee Hall and Oxford House but is riddled with factual inaccuracies and unsubstantiated judgments about the two settlements. See “A Gentleman in Every Slum: Church of England Missions in East London, 1837–1914,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1976. Geoff Ginn offers a meticulously researched comparison between Toynbee Hall and the People’s Palace with an emphasis on the role of cultural philanthropy in the slums: “Gifts of Culture, Centres of Light: Cultural Philanthropy in the late Victorian East End” (Ph.D. diss., University of Queensland, 2001). Sara Burke has traced the transplantation of the English settlement ideal to Canada in Seeking the Highest Good: Social Science and Gender at the University of Toronto, 1888–1937 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). See also Kevin Murphy’s treatment of sexual dissidence in male settlements in New York in “Socrates in the Slums: Homoerotics, Gender, and Settlement House Reform” in Laura McCall and Donald Yacovone, eds., A Shared Experience: Men, Women, and Gender in U.S. History (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Michael Rose has pioneered comparative work in Britain and the United States and has moved outside London in examining the British movement; see his “Settlement of University Men in Great Towns: University Settlements in Manchester and Liverpool,” Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire (1989): 137–160; and “The Settlement House and Social Welfare: Britain and the United States,” Working Papers in Economic and Social History, University of Manchester, no. 6 (January 1991).

  5. In his book Making Men, Waldo Eagar stresses the role of settlers in attempting to make men out of working-class boys but entirely ignores settlers’ own attempts to remake themselves into new kinds of men. See Making Men: The History of Boys’ Clubs and Related Movements in Great Britain (London: University of London Press, 1953), esp. ch. 6. Eagar was a resident at Oxford House in 1907. See The Oxford House Chronicle 21, no. 7 (July 1907): 1.

  6. On the definition of aestheticism and the complex social and cultural affiliations it encouraged, see Diana Maltz, “Aestheticism in the Slums: University Settlements and the Case of the Toynbee Travellers,” unpublished essay in author’s possession. See also Ian Fletcher, “Some Aspects of Aestheticism,” in O. M. Brack, Jr., ed., Twilight of Dawn: Studies
of English Literature in Transition (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1987). See also Ruth Z. Temple, “Truth in Labelling: Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, Decadence, Fin-de-Siècle,” English Literature in Transition 17 (1974).

  7. On the links between aestheticism and dissident sexuality, see Richard Dellamore, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

  8. See Daniel Rodgers’s account of the impact of what he calls “aesthetic tourists” in shaping social politics in Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 41–44; on aesthetics and urban social reform in Britain, see Helen Meller, ed., and introduction to Samuel Barnett, The Ideal City (1894: repr. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979).

  9. Susan Pennybacker, A Vision for London, 1889–1914: Labour, Everyday Life, and the LCC Experiment (London: Routledge, 1995); see also Paul Thompson, Socialists, Liberals, and Labour: The Struggle for London, 1885– 1914 (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1967).

  10. On Maurice’s inspiration, see Thomas Hughes to Samuel Barnett, December 31, 1878, Barnett Papers, Lambeth Palace Library.

  11. On the tension between universalist and exclusionary uses of fraternity in France, see Felicity Baker, “Rousseau’s Oath and Revolutionary Fraternity: 1789 and Today,” Romance Quarterly 38 (August 1991): 273–287.

  12. The publication of Hurrell Froude’s Remains, with its revelation of his macabre fascination with bodily self-mortification, coupled with Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, merely confirmed the fears of the movement’s most virulent critics that the movement was “unEnglish and unmanly.” See David Hilliard, “UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies 25 (Winter 1982): 181–210. For the links between Anglo-Catholicism and homosexuality in the mid-twentieth century, see Tom Driberg’s autobiography Ruling Passions (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), 16, 48. Driberg explicitly linked his pursuit of sex with working-class men and youths with his political radicalism and love of high Anglican ritualism. He saw nothing hypocritical about his various sets of sexual and political desires.