by Koven, Seth
According to Frederick, it was another bath the next day, one not recounted by James in the text of “A Night,” that brought to an end James’s experience as a casual.
When they [James and Bittlestone] went in they were well disguised, but any close observer would have perceived they were got up for the occasion. After spending sixteen hours in the cold, squalor and obscene brutality of the casual ward they seemed absolutely to have become confirmed tramps and vagabonds…. It was not until they had gone home, had a bath, and were comfortably warmed and fed, that they could be induced to talk quietly about their experience.64
This second bath reverses the terrifying descent into the casual ward initiated by the first. It enables James to metamorphose once again, only this time he is transformed from a tramp back into a gentleman-journalist. Perhaps even more significantly, this bath allows him to reclaim his social identity and marks the beginning of the process whereby he translates “experience” into speech and hence into narrative. The two baths—one involuntary, punitive, and disgusting; the other voluntary and therapeutic—underscore the vastly different experiences and meanings of bathing for rich and poor Victorians. It helps to explain the resistance and hostility so many poor people showed toward the well-intentioned zeal of many proponents of baths as instruments of social hygiene. Just as most of the poor loathed porridge because it reminded them of workhouse food, so too the ritual of bathing smacked of the humiliating initiation rites into the discomforts of prisons, casual wards, and night refuges.65 In Pygmalion (1913), George Bernard Shaw used this history to great satiric effect in the most famous bath scene in British literature. The coerced confiscation of an enraged Eliza Dolittle’s clothes and her compulsory plunge into a bath initiate her transformation from a “draggletailed guttersnipe” into a “lady” who can pass for a duchess. Shaw, like Greenwood, was keenly attuned to the confusion of erotic and hygienic impulses. What upper-class Higgins insists is merely a matter of basic cleanliness, Eliza and Higgins’s servant, Mrs. Pearce, construe as an immoral violation of her bodily privacy worthy of police intervention.66
As soon as Greenwood enters the casual-ward bath, he learns that Daddy never intended him to bathe. Apparently, Daddy has not been fooled by Greenwood’s disguise. Greenwood reports that Daddy tells him that he is “a clean and decent sort of man.” Reproducing the social distinctions of the world outside the workhouse, Daddy explains that the bath is only for “them filthy beggars … that want washing.” The kindly Daddy then hands Greenwood a fresh towel and a blue striped shirt. Wearing only his shirt, Greenwood progresses into the makeshift sleeping shed where his “appalled vision” takes in a scene akin to Dante’s Inferno. As Greenwood begins to make sense of the contorted jumble of naked limbs and torsos in the overcrowded and cold shed, he observes that “in not a few cases two gentlemen had clubbed beds and rugs and slept together. In one case (to be further mentioned presently) four gentlemen had so clubbed together.”
Greenwood’s word choices layer irony upon irony. The repeated epithet “gentlemen” to describe naked, impoverished men and boys captured in lewd postures reminds readers that they, like Greenwood and his unacknowledged companion, are the only real gentlemen. At the same time, Greenwood’s and his readers’ claims to respectability are compromised by their desire and willingness to enter, literally or imaginatively, into the contaminated space of the shed. While the word “clubbed” means “shared,” it also evokes the cozy intimacies of the upper-class male world of public schools, colleges, and the social, literary, and political clubs of London.67 Once again, Greenwood suggests a parallel between his readers and the casual poor that simultaneously distances and collapses the distances separating them.
Victorian readers were well acquainted with the moral and sexual dangers of crowding large numbers of poor people into confined spaces. Alarm about the mingling of sexes, generations, and naked bodies played an essential role in several major public health, workplace, and purity campaigns in the decades before the publication of “A Night.” The First Report of the Commissioners for Enquiring into the Employment and Conditions of Children in Mines and Manufactories (1842) was an immediate sensation because of its lurid descriptions and accompanying illustrations of the obscene conditions surrounding the work of naked (or near-naked) men, women, and children in the depths of mines.68 The report so effectively deployed its sexually charged written and visual rhetorics that Parliament passed the 1842 Regulation of Mines Act, which overrode prevailing prejudices against state interference in the free labor market and excluded women and children from work in mines. Fears about sex between men and women and between men and girls were also staples of housing reformers throughout the century in their attempts to abolish single-room cottages and tenements. Such dwellings inhabited by entire families, and often by male subtenants unrelated by ties of kinship, promoted not only the spread of contagious diseases, reformers insisted, but incest as well.69 With his 1847 Quarterly Review article, the evangelical Tory reformer Lord Shaftesbury became the most outspoken champion of state-mandated inspection of mixed-sex common lodging houses, whose unregulated disorders made them “the deepest dens of vice, filth, and misery.”70
These campaigns and the subsequent parliamentary legislation stemming from them assumed that physical closeness necessarily led to the sexual degradation and exploitation of girls and women by men. Greenwood radically reworked this tradition by suggesting that an all-male space and institution could also be a site of moral and sexual danger. There were scattered precedents for such arguments. For example, some laboring people in the 1830s lamented that the New Poor Law encouraged unnatural sex in place of procreative sexual relations by substituting boys for wives as the bedpartners of destitute men.71 More spectacularly, parliamentary investigations in 1846–47 revealed the chronic and pervasive practice of sodomy in convict colonies at Norfolk Island and Moreton Bay, where prisoners were housed in conditions very similar to the casual ward. The vast barracks lacked lights and supervision, and many lacked even rudimentary boards to separate sleepers from one another.72 Many elite men, for their part, were all too well aware of the intense emotional and physical bonds between boys and young men that bloomed in the hothouse atmosphere of all-male public schools and colleges.
While the men and boys are condemned to the workhouse for the sin of homelessness, “A Night” intimates that they are guilty of other “unspeakable” vices as well. Exploiting fully the dramatic possibilities of serial newspaper publication, Greenwood postpones speaking about these vices until the next installment because he has, quite literally, reached the bottom of the printed page of the newspaper. He assures his readers that what he has told “is true and faithful in every particular. I am telling a story which cannot all be told—some parts of it are far too shocking; but what I may tell has not a single touch of false colour in it.”73
January 13, 1866
So swift was the impact of the first installment of “A Night” that by the next day, Greenwood’s audience had grown far beyond the regular readers of the Pall Mall Gazette. The installment for January 13 opens briskly with Greenwood’s realization that the commotion of his fellow inmates—who smoked and spat tobacco and boisterously swapped autobiographical vignettes—made sleep impossible. In a passage that must have tested the limits of permissible expression in the daily press of the 1860s, Greenwood ruminates: “For several minutes there was such a storm of oaths, threats, and taunts—such a deluge of foul words raged in the room—that I could not help thinking of the fate of Sodom; as, indeed, I did several times during the night.” At first glance, Greenwood’s allusion to Sodom need not necessarily carry with it sexual connotations; in the 1860s, Sodom represented vice and deviant behavior in many forms. But his coy aside that he could not help thinking about Sodom “several times during the night” deliberately provokes readers to ask why and raises expectations of more explicitly prurient disclosures.
In the next paragraph, Greenwood indirectly but un
mistakably demonstrates why he thought of Sodom “during the night,” and, by so doing, implicates himself in the erotics of “A Night.” His musings on Sodom are immediately followed by the introduction of “Kay” or “K.,” an androgynous “lanky boy of about fifteen” to whom Greenwood is deeply attracted.
He was a very remarkable-looking lad, and his appearance pleased me much. Short as his hair was cropped, it still looked soft and silky; he had large blue eyes set wide apart, and a mouth that would have been faultless but for its great width; and his voice was as soft and sweet as any woman’s. Lightly as a woman, too, he picked his way over the stones towards the place where the beds lay, carefully hugging his cap beneath his arm.
Kay’s entrance allows Greenwood to escape briefly from the squalor of his surroundings and experience a moment of visual and visceral pleasure. By metaphorically feminizing Kay—Kay picks his way “lightly as a woman”—Greenwood makes him into a somewhat more acceptable object of male admiration and lust. But when Kay, in a “sweet” voice, asks “who’ll give me part of his doss [bed] … who’ll let me turn in with him,” Greenwood “feared how it would be.”
One may well ask: what is it that Greenwood fears and for whom? Ostensibly, Greenwood is fantasizing about the fearful fate the beautiful Kay will suffer by sharing his bed and body with a degraded brute. Several paragraphs later, Greenwood acknowledges his own fears as well.74 The arrival of “great hulking ruffians, some with rugs and nothing else” precipitates what can be read as another moment of panic. “This was terrible news for me. Bad enough, in all conscience, was it to lie as I was lying; but the prospect of sharing my straw with some dirty scoundrel of the Kay breed was altogether unendurable.” Kay, the erstwhile “remarkable-looking lad” is now a paradigmatic “dirty scoundrel.”
Greenwood ends his contribution for January 13, 1866, with an erotically charged glimpse of Kay standing at the water pump “without a single rag to his back,” illuminated by the pale light of the “frosty moon” coming through the “rent in the canvas” wall of the shed. Reiterating his theme that what he has written is accurate and true, Greenwood unconvincingly dons the mantel of the self-sacrificing martyr and attempts to deflect responsibility for the articles onto Mr. Editor: “I hope, Mr. Editor, that you will not think me too prodigal of these reminiscences” in writing about “an adventure which you persuaded me (‘ah,! woeful when!’) to undertake for the public good.” Once again, the Pall Mall Gazette and Greenwood used the literal limits of the printed page to keep readers eager for more disclosures.
January 15, 1866
The final installment, published on January 15, is the longest but, in many respects, least interesting of the three. The bulk of it describes the process of getting dressed in the morning, eating breakfast, and performing the compulsory labor of turning the large cranks of the flour mill located in the shed that had just served as the dormitory the night before. The last two paragraphs of this final installment of “A Night” offer a suggestive condensation of the written and unwritten messages, both permissible and taboo, contained in the articles taken together. Declaring that “the moral of all this I leave to the world,” Greenwood absolves himself of responsibility for interpreting the tale he has told and for the consequences of leading his readers into morally and sexually dangerous territories. He also enjoins readers not to be swayed by the more favorable assessment of Lambeth Workhouse offered by Mr. H. B. Farnall, the metropolitan inspector for the Poor Law Board, published by the Daily News that same day.
Greenwood’s short last paragraph, addressed to Farnall, is an almost spiteful act of titillation: “One word in conclusion. I have some horrors for Mr. Farnall’s private ear (should he like to learn about them) infinitely more revolting than anything that appears in these papers.” Greenwood will only whisper the naked truths of his nocturnal adventures among men and boys into the “private ear” of another man. The last paragraph, then, recapitulates not only the transgressive erotics of “A Night” but also recalls the homosocial character of both the male casual ward and the Pall Mall Gazette’s aspiration to be a paper written by and for “gentlemen.”
Farnall’s report on the condition of the Lambeth Workhouse—duly entered onto the workhouse visitors’ book on January 13, the day the second installment of “A Night” was published—offers a terse official alternative to Greenwood’s. While he demanded that the guardians immediately take certain corrective measures, Farnall lent the support of the Poor Law Board to the guardians of the Lambeth poorhouse: “I have today inspected the wards provided for the houseless poor in this workhouse, and which I have some time since certified as good and sufficient wards, and which I still consider to be so.”75 As Farnall’s phrase “I have today” [my emphasis] makes clear, he visited the workhouse during the day in his official capacity as a poor-law inspector. By contrast, Greenwood gathered the data for his report on workhouse conditions disguised as a casual during the “night.” Juxtaposing Greenwood’s and Farnall’s “inspections” suggests that the Lambeth Workhouse and its inmates look very different under cover of night than in the glare of the day. Greenwood uses “night” both as a condition of darkness and as a specific time to stimulate his audience to read beyond the printed page, to produce their own texts out of the dark corners of their fantasies about themselves and the poor.
Both literally and as a ubiquitous trope of philanthropic slum narratives, night liberates the impoverished inhabitants and well-to-do explorers of the slums to redefine the seemingly immutable conventions of class, gender, and sexuality that govern day and their “official” daily lives.76 The darkness of night and his imposture as a casual make possible the “true” revelations Greenwood offers readers, whereas the light of day and the sanctioned apparatus of state inspection can only produce concealment and hypocrisy. Greenwood provides readers with the disturbing discovery that the meanings and uses of urban space are mutable and depend on who occupies the space, at what time, and under what conditions.77 The workhouse, ostensibly the epitome of the state’s disciplinary authority over the lives of the poor, becomes in Greenwood’s account of it a place of publicly subsidized disorder and male same-sex license.
My reading of “A Night” has emphasized its many homoerotic themes and images; however, the calculated ambiguities of Greenwood’s prose make it easy to miss them if we so choose. Greenwood’s brilliance lay in his ability to disclose just enough of what he claimed to have observed to excite in his readers a desire to know the whole truth about male casual wards. He understood the particular pleasures of the process of coyly disrobing, in not allowing his audience to stare too long or too closely at the naked body supposedly concealed beneath. This is especially true for “A Night” because we are not quite sure that its rhetorical performance depends on real men engaged in real sodomitical acts. We, like Greenwood’s mid-Victorian readers, can never recover what actually happened in the Lambeth Casual Ward the night Greenwood visited. However, we can explain why Greenwood’s contemporaries were so obsessed with trying to authenticate every detail of his narrative. What was at stake for them?
RESPONSES TO “A NIGHT IN A WORKHOUSE”
“A Night” was at once remarkably protean and sticky. Its shape seemed to change according to the needs of each person who tried to grab hold of it. It literally assumed many different forms as it moved from its site of original publication as a series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette, to condensed reprints and summaries in other newspapers, to pamphlets and broadsides,78 to multiple theatrical productions, and even to illustrative photographs. Contemporaries succeeded in attaching many issues to “A Night,” such as parliamentary reform and the bloody suppression of the Jamaican insurrection in Morant Bay, which had no obvious or necessary connection to it. It provoked passionate public and private responses among a wide range of constituencies: the staff and readers of the Pall Mall Gazette; other journalists and writers; the guardians and vestrymen of Lambeth; state officials, including the home secr
etary and the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police; inmates in workhouses and casual wards; and a vast public of affluent and poor, educated and uneducated readers. It triggered many imitators and led to a far-reaching investigation, conducted largely through the daily and periodical press, into Greenwood’s truthfulness and into the workings of the poor law. Even the leaders of the workhouse infirmary movement tried to take advantage of the furor to renew their claims to public sympathy. Reassembling the textual chain set in motion by the publication of “A Night” and tracing its complex effects (historical and literary) make it possible to analyze the social, political, and sexual investments that powerfully informed the various ways in which Greenwood’s contemporaries understood “A Night.” It also underscores the ways in which social and sexual categories sometimes reinforced one another, while at other times the social all but eclipsed the sexual, erasing its traces as effectively as Greenwood concealed the existence of his companion Bittlestone.