Slumming

by Koven, Seth

  136. Willliam Michael Rossetti to Mrs. Gilchrist, June 26, 1885, in Clarence Gohdes and Paul Baum, eds., Letters of William Michael Rossetti concerning Whitman, Blake, and Shelly to Anne Gilchrist and Her Son Herbert Gilchrist (Durham: Duke University Press, 1934; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1968), 149. Citations are to the AMS edition.

  137. Samuel Barnett, “The Failure of Philanthropy,” Macmillan (March 1896) as reprinted in Living Age (April 25, 1896), 231.

  138. H. Clay Trumbull, Friendship the Master Passion (Philadelphia: J. D. Wattles, 1892), 386. The closest English equivalent, although one much more self-evidently seeking the historical origins of sexual love between men, is Edward Carpenter, Iolaus: An Anthology of Friendship (London: G. Allen, 1906). By using terms such as “comrade attachment” and “romantic comrades,” Carpenter claimed that such relationships existed universally among both “primitive” and “civilized” peoples. Scott Holland was no stranger to “friendship love” and its “passionate strain.” In such friendships, Holland recalled, the two male friends “in vain … reach out embracing arms to each other, in vain they cling to each other: the unity cannot attain its fullness, its satisfaction: they stand apart, confused, delicious sympathies may cross, and re-cross, from another touching, entwining, binding but not dissolving the barriers, not making the twain one.” See Paget, Memoir and Letters, 94–95.

  139. Thomas Hancock Nunn, “The Universities’ Settlement in Whitechapel,” Economic Review (October 1892): 479.

  140. Samuel Barnett, manuscript of speech delivered at Toynbee Hall, July 2, 1889, ms. 1463, ff 60, Barnett Papers, Lambeth Palace. Barnett told Sarah Tooley, the interviewer sent by the Humanitarian, that “in the East you see Humanity as it is, in the West you see it clothed.” In other words, he identified East London with both a metaphorical nakedness and truths about humanity. See Sarah Tooley, “The Social Problem In East London: An Interview with the Rev. Canon Samuel Barnett,” Humanitarian (April 1899), 235.

  141. Major biographies of Ashbee include Alan Crawford, C. R. Ashbee, Architect, Designer and Romantic Socialist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); and Fiona MacCarthy, The Simple Life, C. R. Ashbee in the Cotswolds (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981). On Fry and his intimate but not sexual relation with Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, see Frances Spalding, Roger Fry, Art and Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), ch. 2, esp. p. 27. On Dickinson and his desire “to serve humanity,” see E. M. Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (London: E. Arnold and Co., 1934), 28.

  142. C. R. Ashbee, journal, December 11, 1885, Ashbee Papers.

  143. Ibid., July 25, 1886.

  144. Ibid., August 20, 1887; September 8, 1887.

  145. This episode in Ashbee’s career at Toynbee echoed William Morris’s equally self-conscious adventure in painting frescoes on the walls of the Oxford Union several decades earlier. Both gestures were public declarations of inchoate visions of society and confirmations of new directions in their private lives. On Morris, see E. P. Thompson, William Morris, Romantic Revolutionary (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1955).

  146. Ashbee Journals, August 28, 1887. See Hugh Legge, “The Repton Club,” in John Matthew Knapp, ed., The Universities and the Social Problem (London: Rivington, Percival and Co., 1895), 133–47. I discuss many other effusive descriptions of rough lads by male philanthropists in “From Rough Lads to Hooligans” in Andrew Parker, et al. eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992).

  147. Percy Colson, Life of the Bishop of London (London: Jarrolds, 1935), 32–33.

  148. See Martha Vicinus, “The Adolescent Boy: Fin de Siècle Femme Fatale?” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5 (Summer 1994): 90–114.

  149. See Ashbee’s history of the School and Guild of Handicraft, Endeavour Towards the Teaching of John Ruskin and William Morris (London: E. Arnold, 1901).

  150. Edward Carpenter to C. R. Ashbee, October 9, 1887, Ashbee Papers. The poet and socialist William Morris discouraged Ashbee. See Ashbee to Fry, December 14, 1887, and journal entry of approximately same date, Ashbee Papers.

  151. Ashbee, journal, “Summing up of two years,” end of 1888, Ashbee Papers.

  152. See C. R. Ashbee, Memoirs, vol 1, The Guild Idea, introduction, written in 1938, p. 54, CRA/3, Ashbee Papers.

  153. Ibid.

  154. Ashbee, journal, March 21, 1889, Ashbee Papers.

  155. Ibid.

  156. Galton was the son of a highly skilled and well-paid saddle maker who suffered a precipitous decline in earnings and social status in the 1870s as the saddle industry was deskilled and moved to mass production. By the age of three or four, Galton was living in a King’s Cross tenement with one wash closet for twenty-five people; six years later his father became permanently unemployed. He later became a trade unionist, writer, and private secretary and researcher for Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  157. See manuscript “Autobiography of Frank Wallis Galton,” Galton Papers.

  158. Galton was perhaps the only working-class boy of his generation who later became a resident at a settlement house. He joined Mrs. Humphry Ward’s settlement house in Bloomsbury.

  159. For encomiums by working-class memoirists about Toynbee Hall and the Barnetts, see Frederick Rogers, Labour, Life and Literature: Some Memories of Sixty Years (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1913), 81–82; and Thomas Okey, A Basketful of Memories (London: J. M. Dent, 1930), 50.

  160. See Kegan Paul to Arthur Rogers, n.d., box 2, ff. 416, Thorold Rogers Papers. Kegan Paul was a sort of patron saint for Ashbee and his circle.

  161. For Janet’s contributions and perspective on their marriage, see Felicity Ashbee, Janet Ashbee: Love, Marriage, and the Arts and Crafts Movement (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002). See especially ch. 3 on the concept of the “comrade wife.”

  162. On the identification of the “aesthete” and the “homosexual” as masculine types during the Wilde trial, see Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side (New York: Routledge, 1993), 135–136. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s immensely influential analysis of tensions between acceptable homosocial relations and banned homosexual relations in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). Sedgwick argues that “because the paths of male entitlement, especially in the nineteenth century, required certain intense male bonds that were not readily distinguishable from the most reprobate bonds, an endemic and ineradicable state of what I am calling male homosexual panic became the normal condition of male heterosexual entitlement.” Epistemology, 185. On sex scandals between adult men and working-class male youths in Toronto, see Steven Maynard, “‘Horrible Temptations’: Sex, Men, and Working-Class Male Youth in Urban Ontario, 1890–1935,” Canadian Historical Review 78, no. 2 (June 1997): 191–235.

  163. H. Montgomery Hyde, ed., Famous Trials 7: Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin Books, 1962), 127–130. This quote comes from the first trial of the Marquess of Queensberry on the charge of criminally libeling Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s writing frequently alluded to the mingling of aestheticism and philanthropy that was such a marked feature of Toynbee Hall and many other charitable schemes. The London slums figured prominently in his writings, both literary and journalistic, as a site for the expression of heterodox desires. Wilde was critical of and skeptical about the charitable practices of high-society philanthropists, and more generally, of contemporary altruists who, he believed, aggravated rather than solved the problem of poverty. However, he did reserve sincere praise for that group of men who, we must assume, were residents at Toynbee Hall and perhaps other men’s settlement houses. In his essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Wilde rejoiced that “at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life—educated men who live in the East End—coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the grou
nd that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.” See Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (St. Louis, MO: Herman Schwartz, 1906), 3. The essay was first published in the Fortnightly Review (February 1, 1891).

  164. W. T. Stead as quoted in Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet, 1977), 21.

  165. Jeffrey Weeks describes the prevalence of cross-age and cross-class sexual relations between well-to-do men and working class youths as a form of “sexual colonialism.” Ibid., 40.

  166. The chapter can also be read as a pornographic unmasking of the homoerotic tensions in Horatio Alger’s story about the redemption of a New York shoeblack through the interventions of a middle-class gentleman. See Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick (Boston: Loring, 1868); on its homoerotic content, see Michael Moon, “‘The Gentle Boy from the Dangerous Classes’: Pederasty, Domesticity, and Capitalism in Horatio Alger,” Representations 19 (Summer 1987): 87–110. Alger himself had fled New England after acknowledging inappropriate sexual contact with a boy and was an ardent supporter of philanthropic schemes for shoeblacks.

  167. See [John Saul], Sins of the Cities of the Plain, Or Confessions of a Maryanne (New York: Masquerade, 1992), ch. 12. I first analyzed this scene in “From Rough Lads to Hooligans,” 370. Morris Kaplan has subsequently provided a much fuller reading of this text in its original published form in “Who’s Afraid of John Saul? Urban Culture and the Politics of Desire in Late Victorian London,” GLQ 5, no. 3, esp. 283–290.

  168. Toynbee Record (December 1889), 26.

  169. Toynbee Record (October 1889), 9.

  170. H. H. Asquith, speech at Balliol House, reported in Toynbee Record (April 1891), 77.

  171. Samuel Barnett to Francis Barnett, March 7, 1896, F/Bar/139, Barnett Papers, London Metropolitan Archives.

  172. The “Wadham House Journal” existed only as a single manuscript copy. I have seen only one surviving issue, no. 8, for 1905. It contains eight parts but no pagination. The parts are 1. Editorial, 2. The Stones of London, part II, 3. The Anatomy of a Smile, 4. Notes and Jottings, 5. Wadham Notes, 6. Ancient Wales. Part II, 7. Spring Poetry: Assossiette and A Blighted Life, 8. Photographic Illustrations, Various. My deep thanks to Lorraine Blair for discovering the journal at Toynbee Hall itself, Barnett Research Center. All further references in my text are to this document.

  173. Ibid. James Adams argues that “the reception of early Victorian brotherhoods … put in wide circulation a social semiotic that was to transform male secrecy into the sign of ‘the closet,’” but he also warns against conflating all secrets with homosexual desire. See Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, 13, 17.

  174. On middle- and upper-class men’s rejection of many elements of domesticity, see John Tosh, “The Making of Masculinities: The Middle Class in Late Nineteenth Century Britain,” in Angela John and Claire Eustace, eds., The Men’s Share? Masculinities, Male Support, and Women’s Suffrage in Britain, 1890– 1920 (London: Routledge, 1997), esp. 41–47.

  175. James Adderley, diary of “Tramping Without Tears in 1896,” as quoted in Stevens, Father Adderley, 29.

  176. Punch (November 24, 1894) as quoted in Linda Dowling, “The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890s,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33 (1979): 445.

  177. Philip Gibbs’s The New Man: A Portrait Study of the Latest Type (London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1913) opens by setting the emergence of the New Man against the history of the New Woman from the 1880s onwards. For Gibbs, the New Man “has been profoundly affected by the changing ideals and characteristics of his women.” While I concur with Gibbs that men responded to women, this chapter has argued against his assertion that “the New Man … has been created largely by the New Woman” (3–5). On the New Man, see George Robb and Nancy Erber, eds, Disorder in the Court: Trials and Sexual Conflict at the Turn of the Century (London: Macmillan, 1999), 1.

  178. Oxford Magazine, June 4, 1884, 281. On Browning’s views of male friendship and love and their relationship to “sympathy” for inferiors, see Oscar Browning, “Sympathy in Common Life,” Humanitarian (February 1897), 88–92; “The Love of Plato,” Humanitarian (April 1897), 253–256. On the sexual controversies surrounding Browning and his friendships with “young working lads,” see H. Montgomery Hyde, The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name: A Candid History of Homosexuality in Britain (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970), 116–120.

  179. J. A. Symonds as quoted in Toynbee Record (April 1890), 78.

  180. Symonds’s revelation that “some at least of the deepest moral problems might be solved by fraternity” occurred to him in 1877. He had picked up a “brawny young soldier” with “frank eyes” on the street and later met him in a private room where he “enjoyed the close vicinity of that splendid naked piece of manhood.” But rather than having sex, they sat and talked. Presumably Symonds paid him for his time. Symonds was not able to fully understand the extent to which the unequal economic conditions of their encounter posed its own set of moral problems. See Phyllis Grosskurth, ed., The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds (New York: Random House, 1984), 253–254. Cross-class sex was an ongoing fascination for Symonds. I analyzed his response to Greenwood’s workhouse scandals in chapter 1.

  181. Forster was presumably referring to Cambridge House in South London. On Lytton Strachey’s cross-class sexual fantasies, see Julie Anne Taddeo, Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity: The Last Eminent Victorian (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2002), ch. 2.

  182. See E. M. Forster, Maurice (New York: Norton, 1971). Forster was well acquainted with the philanthropic projects and many of the men discussed in this chapter. He believed that Ashbee “had a gift for practical organization and for sympathetic contact with the working class.” See Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, 35. On Forster’s “foreclosing” the radical potential of his own project, see Sara Suleri’s analysis of Forster’s A Passage to India in The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ch. 6, esp. p. 137.

  183. See T. A. Ross, “A Case of Homosexual Inversion,” Journal of Neurology and Psychopathology 7 (April 1927), reprinted in Lucy Bland and Laura Doane, eds., Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 66–67. Ross wholly pathologized homosexuality, and the case study concludes with Ross successfully restoring his patient to normal heterosexuality.

  184. In this respect, I follow Christopher Lane, who warns that “queer theory increasingly assists–rather than avoiding—this eclipse of historical difference by substituting terms such as ‘deviance’ and ‘perversion’ for the dissimilarities, aporias, and discontinuities [between past and present] they only partially represent.” Lane continues that “historical differences immediately get lost and sexual meaning buckles under a demand for interpretive certainty.” Christopher Lane, The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 227.

  185. As a citadel for the purification of the slums, Toynbee Hall was a space not subject to the surveillance of purity crusaders and the police. Gustav-Wrathall argues that the YMCAs served as important meeting places for homosexual men in late Victorian and early-twentieth-century America. But unlike London settlement houses, YMCAs were subject to policing. See John Donald Gustav-Wrathall, Take the Young Stranger by the Hand: Same-Sex Relations and the YMCA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

  186. There is a vast and sophisticated theoretical literature about the emergence of homosexuality as well as the differences between terms such as “sexual identity” and “sexual subjectivity,” “homosexuality” and “homoerotic desire,” “masculine types” and “masculine personae.” The work of Michel Foucault has been the starting point for much of this discussion. On Foucault and the need to refine his arguments, see David Halperin, “Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexualit
y,” Representations 63 (1998): 93–120.

  187. Ashbee recorded his reflections on Winnington Ingram in two extended entries, which I have combined. See C. R. Ashbee, March 1901 and July 23, 1901, journal, vol. 1, Ashbee Papers.

  188. An example of his political caution but openness was his eventual conversion to women’s suffrage in 1914. See Extracts from Speeches by the Bishop of London and the Bishop of Oxford in Behalf of the Woman Suffrage Bill in the House of Lords, London, England, May 7, 1914 (Richmond, VA: Equal Suffrage League, 1914).

  189. See minutes of the Guild of Handicraft, vol. 1, mss. English 86.DD.15, entries for October 16, 1890; July 10, 1891; October 23, 1891; and October 27, 1891, Victoria and Albert Museum Library.

  190. See ibid., July 23, 1891, and May 12, 1892.

  191. See Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People of London, First Series, vol. 1, “Poverty” (New York: AMS Press, 1902, 1970), 100. For a naïvely appreciative account of the clubs at Oxford House, see Francis Eardley, “A Workmen’s Club in the East End,” Good Words 36 (1895), 227–231. One of Eardley’s hosts from Oxford House must have told him about the failed attempt to allow University Club men to manage their own club because he noted that “working men are excellent managers if they have a controlling hand over them…. left alone on committees, petty squabbles will arise on very trivial pretexts.”

  192. Winnington Ingram outlined his ideas about working men’s clubs in “Working Men’s Clubs,” in J. M. Knapp, ed., The Universities and the Social Problem (London: Rivington, Percival and Co., 1895). He had noted the challenges of steering between “the Scylla of despotism and the Charybdis of anarchy” in managing the clubs (43).

  193. In 1890, Oxford House experimented with and then abandoned self-rule by club members. See General Meeting, University Club, January 21, 1890, as reported in The Trumpet (February 1890). I have located only one set of the club’s journal, The Trumpet, at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. On the history of working-men’s clubs, see Laurence Marlow, “The Working Men’s Club Movement, 1862–1912: A Study of the Evolution of a Working Class Institution,” Ph.D. diss., University of Warwick, 1980. See also, T. G. Ashplant, “London Working Men’s Clubs, 1875–1914,” in Eileen and Stephen Yeo, eds., Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590–1914 (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1981); Richard Price, “The Working Men’s Club Movement and Victorian Social Reform Ideology,” Victorian Studies 15 (December 1971): 117–147; and John Taylor, From Self-Help to Glamour: The Working Men’s Club, History Workshop Pamphlet No. 7 (Oxford: History Workshop, 1972).