Slumming

by Koven, Seth

  The urban historian H. J. Dyos has argued, and I think cogently so, that the word “slum” has “no fixity” and “was being used in effect for a whole range of social and political purposes.”29 The fundamental instability of meanings attached to the “slum” and its associated word forms is reflected in the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions. According to the OED, “slumming” is “the visitation of slums, esp. for charitable purposes.” But it referred readers to the verb “to slum,” which it defined in several ways: “to go into, or frequent, slums for discreditable purposes; to saunter about, with a suspicion, perhaps, of immoral pursuits” and “to visit slums for charitable or philanthropic purposes, or out of curiosity, esp. as a fashionable pursuit.” “Slummers” usually referred to those who “slummed” or engaged in “slumming”; but, maddeningly, “slummers” also described the poor residents of slums. Charity and philanthropy mingle with immoral pursuits and voyeuristic curiosity in these definitions, which refuse to be definitive.30

  Following Dyos’s lead, I have made mobility, not fixity, central to my definition of slumming. I use slumming to refer to activities undertaken by people of wealth, social standing, or education in urban spaces inhabited by the poor. Because the desire to go slumming was bound up in the need to disavow it, my history of slumming includes the activities of men and women who used any word except slumming—charity, sociological research, Christian rescue, social work, investigative journalism—to explain why they had entered the slums. My definition of slumming depends upon a movement, figured as some sort of “descent,” across urban spatial and class, gender and sexual boundaries. The sermon preached by Rev. Prebendary W. Rogers in Balliol College Chapel on Sunday, February 4, 1883, captures well the spatial dynamics of slumming with its sanctioned immersion in an otherwise forbidden world. Rev. Rogers invited his audience “to descend with him” into the streets of East London to confront the rampant “coarseness and vulgarity,” “poverty and meanness written upon the countenances of the wayfarers … vice flaunting itself in gaudy apparel.” Not satisfied with the grotesque spectacle of the street, Rogers beckoned churchgoers to penetrate even more intimate interior spaces of the poor: “Follow these people home to their wretched houses in which they are huddled together like the beasts that perish, and you will find them grossly ignorant, semi-paupers.”31 If, as cultural anthropologists tell us, dirt is matter out of order, then slumming required elite men and women to go where they did not belong, out of their expected places. While most justified their slum expeditions as part of an effort to expose and clean up the filth of city life, their roles as urban housekeepers existed in uneasy tension with their own disordering of class, gender, and sexual norms.

  Contemporaries imposed a wide range of meanings and distinctions on their forays into the precincts of the poor as they vied with one another for preeminence in the crowded world of metropolitan philanthropy. While underscoring these differences, each of the following chapters identifies shared cultural assumptions about the social and sexual relations between rich and poor, men and women, that bound together the varied forms of slumming examined in this book.

  WHO WENT SLUMMING? SOURCES AND SOCIAL CATEGORIES

  The socioeconomic backgrounds of those who went slumming and those they went to see ranged very broadly. Throughout this study, I will often use terms such as “rich,” “elite,” and “well-to-do” to characterize slummers. These terms lack precision for they include men and women whose social worlds had little in common beyond their sense that they commanded resources entitling them to gawk at or help the poor. The capaciousness of these terms reflects the heterogeneity of slummers, who included members of the royal family, such as Princess Alice of Hesse; scions of Britain’s most eminent aristocratic dynasties, such as the prime minister Lord Salisbury, whose sons William and Hugh lived in Oxford House in Bethnal Green; upper-middle-class political elites, for example, William Gladstone, whose daughter Helen lived in the south London slums as head of the Women’s University Settlement; the offspring of clergymen and professionals aspiring to gentility; and merchants and their children for whom slumming marked their own recent social ascent. Some, such as the journalist James Greenwood, came from very modest backgrounds and used their slumming to earn their living rather than as a way to share their wealth.32

  The so-called poor, the objects of all this unsolicited benevolence, likewise spanned a considerable spectrum from the homeless to sweated workers packed into one-room tenements to seasonally employed unskilled laborers to regularly employed skilled artisans, whose wages surpassed those of junior clerks. Once again, this grouping defies the commonsense categories of social history.33 Why lump together such diverse people under the umbrella of “the poor” or “laboring men and women” or “the working class”? After all, the late-Victorian pioneers of empirical sociology such as Charles Booth and Ernest Aves, Jesse Argyle, Beatrice Potter, and Clara Collet, themselves deeply involved in the mania for slumming in the 1880s, went to great pains to offer fine-grained distinctions between different groups based on earnings and social and cultural habits. A highly skilled “labour aristocrat” had no more in common with an out-of-work member of the so-called “residuum” or “submerged tenth” than a titled noblewoman did with the daughter of a tradesman who, by dint of intelligence and determination won a scholarship to Girton or Newnham College before embarking on a paid career as a social worker in the slums. “Elite,” “poor,” “well-to-do,” and “laboring people” remain useful though descriptively imprecise terms because they signal the social distance—and contemporaries’ own perception of that distance—which lay at the heart of slumming and slum benevolence. Terms such as “the poor” also convey the social reality that even skilled and relatively well-paid laboring men and women, over the course of their lives, did often experience periods of want and poverty occasioned by sickness and unemployment.34 Many who went slumming came to appreciate the crudeness of their own initial ideas about poverty and understood the vast differences in outlook separating denizens of penny-anight lodging houses from those pillars of working-class respectability who took pride in their immaculate broom-swept front stoops and lace curtains. Other less careful observers did not bother to make such distinctions, generalized about the poor based on their observations of a few sensational cases of misery, or felt cheated when the men and women they encountered seemed altogether too respectable.

  I pay scrupulous attention to the widely varying reasons for and contexts surrounding the many forms of slumming analyzed in this book. For example, we need to understand the particular bureaucratic and moral imperatives which led David Edwards, a licensing inspector for the London County Council, to go undercover and inspect a music and dance hall, the Rose and Crown, on December 29, 1890. The Rose and Crown so happened to be located in one of the most impoverished quarters of East London near the Docks. Neither a craving to see how the poor lived nor charity motivated Edwards. No love of disguise led him to go undercover; inspectors were expected to blend into their surroundings to better observe them. He had a job to do that night, and he did it. But the way he wrote about and interpreted his experiences tapped into much broader ways of thinking and writing about slum life. Edwards could have chosen simply to note that some female prostitutes and their customers frequented the Rose and Crown. Instead, he transformed a routine report of inspection into a tale of disgust and titillation. He reproduced his conversations with a prostitute who importuned him to go home with her. And then, as if anxious to avoid incriminating himself, he opined that “my reason for making such a long report is because I can find no other name for such a place than a hell.”35

  Edwards’s sweeping moral condemnation of the dance hall and all its female habituées as prostitutes did not go unchallenged. The official case file of the administrative hearing noted that during the ensuing interrogation, “A Voice from the Hall” cried out, “many a respectable woman goes there.” We will never know to whom that disembodied voice be
longed, though we can surmise it may have been a woman (or her husband) who went to the Rose and Crown and believed that Edwards’s words had besmirched her reputation.36 Readers will encounter many other such voices throughout this book, ranging from the indignant accusations of several children Dr. Barnardo “rescued” to the self-assertive political rhetoric of laboring men in a Bethnal Green club who refused to play the deferential part their Oxford sponsors had assigned to them. These voices are potent reminders that those positioned as objects of slumming readily challenged their social betters’ characterization of them and had their own ideas about the affluent men and women in their midst. The poor asserted themselves in their daily encounters with philanthropists, but they did so within circumstances of grotesquely unequal power.

  Men and women who went slumming left behind an extraordinary abundance of sources—letters, diaries, memoirs, books, articles, speeches, newspaper stories, annual reports, visual images—which the historian can use to recreate their social and mental landscapes. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to have autobiographies (published and unpublished) and letters written by laboring men and women, which give a fuller sense of their perspective and their use of language to express themselves. However, most residents of working-class and poor neighborhoods in London, while increasingly active participants as readers in Victorian and Edwardian print culture, did not usually have the time, desire, or need to write down their thoughts and feelings.37 We more often than not hear their voices through texts produced by the well-to-do. For example, the spinster housing reformer Ella Pycroft wrote to her colleague Beatrice Potter, daughter of a wealthy merchant and railway executive, recounting the reactions of several East Londoners to an article on unemployment and slum housing that Potter published in the Pall Mall Gazette.38 Pycroft had circulated Potter’s article among residents in the Katherine Buildings, at least one of whom was not edified by what he read. Pycroft explained to Potter that three of the poor residents “having read the article dispassionately, understand it and agree with it all.” But one, a man named Joseph Aarons, “was specially angry at your saying the Buildings were ‘designed and adapted’ for the lowest class of workmen partly because he will take ‘low’ to mean ‘disreputable’; partly because he shares our feelings about the construction of the Bgs. [buildings]. But I told him you did not mean to express approval of their construction, but on the contrary had written strongly against it.”39

  Pycroft’s letter offers a fragmentary glimpse, albeit filtered through her own grid of personal and political preoccupations, of an independentminded working man’s response to the elite slummers in his midst. Far from deferring to Potter as either a “lady” or an amateur sociologist, Aarons objected to her choice of words, which he recognized would adversely mold public perceptions of the social and moral status of the building’s residents. Pycroft, as the author of the letter, gets the final word here as she often, though not always, did in her dealings with her clients. At the same time, her letter captures an otherwise irretrievable moment of intellectual and personal negotiation between an elite woman reformer and a poor man—a sort of tug of war Pycroft and Potter daily enacted with the residents of Katherine Buildings in their philanthropic rounds as lady rent collectors.40 While extant sources make it possible to trace the evolution of Potter’s and Pycroft’s ideas about class relations, poverty, and gender, we can recover little more about Aarons’ thoughts.

  The great social statistician Herbert Spencer was, like Joseph Aarons, quite critical of the way his gifted protégée Beatrice Potter depicted social problems. Spencer distrusted the reliability of information gathered through slumming and urged Potter to put a halt to her risky “doings in London” investigating sweated labor disguised as a poor Jewish seamstress. “Bear in mind,” Spencer admonished, “that the experiences which you thus gain are misleading experiences; for what you think and feel under such conditions are unlike what is felt and thought by those whose experiences you would describe.”41 For Spencer, Potter’s incognito slumming could not possibly serve either her best interests as a young single woman or those of the emerging scientific and objective discipline of sociology.42 Such methods of collecting data were inherently flawed because they blurred the line between participant and observer, social facts and individual fancies. Spencer’s objections to Potter’s escapades (which she herself later dismissed as a “lark”) can be restated in more general terms: slumming was antithetical to seeing society as it truly was. We need not share Spencer’s confidence in the superiority of his own sociological methods to concur with him that slumming did shape how elite men and women represented their experiences among the poor, defined social problems, and developed solutions to them. This is precisely what makes its history so important.

  EROS AND ALTRUISM: JAMES HINTON AND THE HINTONIANS

  Punch, Victorian Britain’s ever vigilant monitor of shifting cultural norms, seemed quite certain that slum benevolence was neither wholly pure nor wholly disinterested. In 1884, it published “In Slummibus,” an ironic visual satire depicting a preening clergyman surrounded by two demurely attractive young ladies carrying presumably wholesome literature for the heathen poor (figure below). The title of the image undoubtedly makes fun of the fad for hiring omnibuses to take visitors through East London’s poorest neighborhoods without soiling their shoes and clothes.43 As the three philanthropists gaze upon the squalid slumscape through which they stroll, they are far from masters of all they survey. They are subjected to the stares and impudent commentary of the poor, including one “small Eastendian” who remarks (in Punch’s best version of proper Cockney): “’Ello! ’Ere’s a Masher! Look at ’is Collar an’ ’At!” In Punch’s commentary, the man of God is mistaken for a “masher,” a slang phrase for a male sexual predator. Apparently, the poor can see through the clergyman’s upright appearance to discern his base motives. He is no different from thousands of West End gentlemen “mashers” who regularly ventured to East London to sample its illicit pleasures: sex, drugs, penny gaffes, and music halls.

  As Punch’s imagery suggests, slumming raised troubling ethical questions about the very nature of the philanthropy itself. Was philanthropy a laudable form of self-denial, an expression of a deep human impulse to witness and enter sympathetically into the suffering of others in order to diminish it? Or was benevolence merely a cover for egoistic self-gratification, a means imaginatively and literally to enter otherwise forbidden spaces, places, and conversations, to satisfy otherwise forbidden desires? What was the right relation between serving others and pleasure? Was eros compatible with altruism?44

  These questions loomed large in the life and writings of the mid-nineteenth-century aural surgeon and social philosopher James Hinton and lay at the very heart of this book. Hinton’s private history and the public history of his ideas and their reception closely parallel that of slumming itself: it is a story of unruly desires and their disavowal, of high ideals and vexed realities. Victorian reformers drew inspiration from many sources, but it was Hinton who most deeply and explicitly articulated how the problems of slum life and the attractions of slumming were enmeshed in a complex matrix of sexual and social politics. My own discovery of Hinton and my surprise that his ideas touched so many men and women involved in slum benevolence helped to shape the questions I pose in this book. Using Hinton as the philosophical point of departure for my history of slumming—instead of other more familiar thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle or John Ruskin or T. H. Green—signals my intention to construct a genealogy of benevolence and social welfare in which gender experimentation and heterodox sexuality figure prominently.

  The stiffly erect, gaitered clergyman appears utterly disdainful of and disconnected from the squalid scene that offers a virtual ethnography of slum types in the imagination of elite observers: barefoot ragged children, a powerful and defiantly-posed working woman with her laundry behind her, and a group of seemingly drunk men clustered in front of the pub, one of whom is so degenerate that he has
a simian rather than a human face. (Punch, May 3, 1884, 210.)

  As slumming gathered momentum in the early 1880s, some claimed that society was beginning to reap the harvest of enlightened altruism Hinton had sown in the years before his death in 1875.45 Hinton devoted his life to unraveling the mysterious sources of the desire to serve others as part of his larger project to liberate women and men from the bodydenying and soul-withering values which he believed inhibited human self-development.46 He could find unity in his philosophy only by mixing “intimately with and becom[ing] the friend of the lowest and poorest class.” He traced the origins of this impulse to his experiences as an apprentice to a woolen draper in Whitechapel, where he daily witnessed the sexual degradation of laboring women. He ached to live among the poor “as a man longs for his wedding-day”47 and insisted that the rich could only realize their fullest selves by sympathizing with and serving those in need. He decried the spiritual deadness of conventional morality, which cut men and women off from nature and the life-affirming wellsprings of genuine altruism.48 Rejecting the belief that women’s moral authority was based on their “passionlessness,” Hinton insisted that it was not only moral but essential for women, as much as men, to enjoy sexual pleasure. He anticipated the day when all women would be emancipated from ruinous “social disabilities,” which kept them from realizing their god-appointed tasks to rule by serving others.49 Men would only reach their human potential once they had been “womaned”—subjected to women’s beneficent influence.50