Slumming
Page 8
Politicians and Journalists
Frederick, in his lead article “Casual Wards,” published the day after the final installment of “A Night,” left no doubt that the Amateur Casual had witnessed an orgiastic scene of sex between men and youths. “What was done was worse than what was said,” Frederick insisted, “and what was said was abominable beyond description or decent imagination.” The workhouse had been transformed into a male brothel, “a sort of chapel of ease to the Cities of the Plain [Sodom and Gomorrah] for the hideous enjoyment of those who are already bad, and the utter corruption of those who are obliged to hear what they cannot prevent.”79 Sounds replace sights, ears replace eyes as the sensory means by which the moral and physical contagion of the casual ward spreads ineluctably from those who are corrupt to those who necessarily will be corrupted. Frederick’s emphasis on the relationship of hearing to the “hideous enjoyments” of “A Night” recalls James’s own repeated claim that what he heard during the night was worse than what he saw. “The conversation was horrible,” James explained, “the tales that were told more horrible still, and worse than either (though not by any means the most infamous things to be heard—I dare not even hint at them) was that song.” Of course, James has hinted at “them.” Far from repressing the memory of these “infamous” sounds—which can only be sounds of sex—James and Frederick encourage readers to imagine and perhaps enjoy them. A popular penny broadside put the matter more succinctly though less explicitly: “there’s queer doings after dark” in the Lambeth Workhouse.80
One indignant correspondent to the Gazette, John Smeaton, the governor of the Combination Poor House, Hawick, was agitated by what Greenwood had written and what he suspected Greenwood had done during his “night” in the workhouse. Greenwood was an untrustworthy guide, Smeaton insisted, because he misrepresented his identity and profession to gain admission to the casual ward. More threateningly, he insinuated that Greenwood had moved beyond the position of observer, one who merely sees and hears, to become a participant, one who knows through touch and intimate proximity. “P.S.,” he wrote, “How did your correspondent find out that ‘K.’s’ hair was soft and silky, and his eyes large and blue, in such a large shed lighted by only one solitary gas jet?”81 Smeaton’s postscript viciously parodies Greenwood’s own, which he introduced with the phrase “one word in conclusion.” Far more important than the mere “postscript” it pretends to introduce, Smeaton’s closing remark emphatically does not bring closure to his argument. It opens up the possibility of interpreting “A Night” as a text that incriminates its author in the evening’s “abominations.”
The Pall Mall Gazette’s editors answered Smeaton’s question exclusively on its most literal level. The author of “A Night” and K. were together, the newspaper explained, “from sunrise till eleven o’clock in the day” so there was ample daylight in which to observe K.’s physical appearance. The editors sidestepped Smeaton’s explosive suggestion that the Gazette’s correspondent had found in K. enjoyable compensation for his night’s discomfort. However, three years later, in an essay on female prostitution, James did offer some revealing general remarks about what motivated him to meddle with such “unsavoury business.” His work was galvanized, not by a search for dark pleasures, but by a righteous sense of social obligation and duty. Silence, he explained, served as a prophylactic—the “‘evil-doers’ armour of impunity”—which encouraged “monstrous evil” to flourish.82 For the journalist-as-social-observer to remain silent about evils he has seen would make him an accessory to immoral acts. In this way, the slum explorer bears a heavy moral weight to expose and correct the abuses he has uncovered even at the risk of compromising his moral standing in the eyes of others.
The public responded to “A Night” with a mixture of incredulity, outrage, and admiration. Was it possible that such abuses actually existed in Lambeth and elsewhere in the metropolis? Journalists and officials, as well as the merely curious, rushed to answer this question by following in Greenwood’s footsteps. The first of Greenwood’s many imitators was none other than the home secretary, Sir George Grey, who was accompanied by Sir Richard Mayne, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and several others. According to the Tower Hamlets Express, this impressive group of gentlemen paid an “unexpected visit at midnight to inspect the casual wards” at Poplar.83 Dubbed the “ministerial midnight inspection” by pundits, the dignitaries expressed themselves “perfectly satisfied” by conditions in the Poplar Workhouse.84 They had selected Poplar because six weeks earlier, its guardians had enlisted the Metropolitan Police to act as assistant relieving officers. All those seeking admission to Poplar’s casual ward first had to apply for admission at the police station. Direct police involvement not only diminished the number of applicants at Poplar but also curbed disorderly behavior inside the ward and made it explicit that the casual poor were indistinguishable from the criminal and dangerous classes. Soon thereafter, the Poor Law Board urged guardians throughout London to adopt the Poplar model by employing police as relieving officers. Although humanitarian impulses to secure the dignity and welfare of homeless citizens may have originally motivated some supporters of the Houseless Poor Act, such generous intentions were now hopelessly entwined with the more urgent imperative to police this population. The poor themselves were outraged that Greenwood’s masquerade as a casual and as their would-be champion resulted not in improvements in their conditions but in further indignities. As one sharp tongued homeless woman exclaimed six months after the publication of “A Night,” “D——that fellow that made a bother about the vagrants; he has only given us extra trouble” by forcing the homeless to endure humiliating delays and abuse at police stations85 (figure 1.2).
Journalists, unwilling to be outdone by cabinet members in their daring search for the truth about workhouses, no longer confined themselves merely to the “scribbling department.” Emboldened by Greenwood’s success, they anticipated a more dignified and elevated role for themselves as “the most efficient teachers of the age” and pioneers in “the realms of practical and everyday philanthropy.”86 Descending into the haunts of poverty promised journalists social prestige and professional advancement. In the winter of 1866, “practical philanthropy” proved extremely profitable for editors who dispatched scores of reporters to undertake midnight visits to workhouses, night refuges, and tawdry lodging houses. Publication of “A Night” initiated an extended dialogue between the Pall Mall Gazette and the rest of the London newspaper world, including the Observer, Daily News, the Saturday Review, the Spectator, the Morning Star, the Telegraph, and above all the Times. The Times’s enthusiastic and swift approval of “A Night” conferred prestige and legitimacy on the Gazette and the Greenwood brothers. Its report about promiscuous arrangements in the Stepney Male Casual Ward rivalled Greenwood’s series in its unsparing description of the moral, physical, and sexual dangers awaiting young and old, innocent and corrupt alike.87
FIGURE 1.2. Punch’s cartoon rightly pointed out that “A Night” had made admission to the casual ward more complicated and intimidating for the truly deserving who, like the mother and child depicted, were compelled to present themselves to the police before gaining admittance to the workhouse. The cartoon also suggests that the criminal element, whom the new regulations intended to control, would merely find another workhouse with more lax enforcement—in this case, Lambeth itself. (Punch, February 3, 1866.)
Some few papers condemned the “pretentious” sensationalism of “A Night,” foremost among them the Observer.88 Yet disdain for the new style of journalism ushered in by Greenwood’s story did not prevent the Observer from participating in the mania for workhouse sojourns. Promising that its reporters would “paint their pictures as they really exist,”89 it launched an unremarkable four-part series of articles entitled “Midnight Visits to the Casual Wards of London.”90 In contrast to Greenwood’s dramatic self-costuming as a tramp, the two reporters for the Observer were “attired in the ordinary w
inter garb … of the middle class.”91
It is hardly surprising that politicians threw themselves into the controversy surrounding “A Night.” At a time when the political rights of unenfranchised laboring people preoccupied Parliament, politicians could ill afford to ignore the social claims of the poor. The condition of the workingman’s home, the air he breathed, the water he drank, and the poorhouse he may one day be compelled to enter were not just social questions but political ones as well in the tense months leading up to the passage of the Second Reform Bill.92 The Greenwood brothers, especially the savvy Frederick, ensured that the press would take a leading role in thrusting social issues into the political arena. Although journalists did not create the abuses in metropolitan workhouses, they did invent them as a public scandal. The Greenwood brothers and the Pall Mall Gazette in particular, and the newspaper and periodical press in general, had a great deal at stake in insuring the longevity and intensity of the scandal surrounding “A Night.” By constantly commenting on and referring to the inquiries undertaken by rival papers, journalists expanded their own social and political authority and helped to sell sordid facts as print commodities.93 The workhouse casual-ward controversy anticipated many of the features we usually associate with the birth of the New Journalism of the 1880s and the ascendancy of the press as the Fourth Estate in public affairs and politics.94
Theatrical Imitators
The cycle of imitation begun by Greenwood’s decision to disguise himself as a “casual” gathered its own momentum and quickly reached fantastic heights of absurdity. By mid-February 1866, Joseph Cave, proprietor of the Theatre Royal in Marylebone in West London, announced that he was opening a new “spirit stirring drama” set in the infamous sleeping shed of the Lambeth Casual Ward.95 According to theater historian Jim Davis, Cave commissioned Colin Hazlewood to adapt Greenwood’s articles for a production called The Casual Ward. In addition to his Marylebone venue, Cave staged the play at the Pavilion in Whitechapel and the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton, both located in densely populated slum districts. Another play, entitled “Nobody’s Son or A Night in the Workhouse,” was also based on Greenwood’s articles and produced in East London at the Effingham Theatre. Tens of thousands of people from across the social spectrum must have seen Cave’s and Hazlewood’s production because it sustained runs ranging from four and a half to fourteen weeks.96
The play itself is entirely undistinguished. A piece of hack writing, it dramatizes the plight of Richard Glover, who has fallen from respectability by extending credit to false friends. Glover unexpectedly inherits a substantial estate from a distant relative in India, but his good fortune is imperiled by the aptly named swindler Graspleigh, who attempts to claim the fortune for himself. While the title page of the manuscript prompt copy claims that the play was “founded on the revelations of Workhouse treatment recently published in the Public press,” the workhouse casual ward is little more than an opportunistic location for a scene. Following the conventions of working-class popular melodrama, honest plebian folk prevail over the unscrupulous collar-wearing petitbourgeois scoundrels.
Davis’s analysis of the manuscript of the Cave and Hazlewood play focuses on the ways in which the text was “subject to censorship in so far as sentiments that [were] excessively subversive or critical of the establishment [were] deleted.”97 He astutely notes several examples in which harsh denunciations of poor-law guardians and workhouse officials contained in Hazlewood’s script were banned by the examiner of plays. The censorship was so successful that the examiner reported to the lord chamberlain that he heard nothing at the play that “any guardian or relieving officer could justly object to.” However, Davis overlooks Hazlewood’s and Cave’s most significant act of censorship, one that they imposed on themselves: their decision to erase all traces of sexual “abominations” between males. According to the surviving notes of the stage director, F. C. Wilton, women were substituted for boys and men for the nonspeaking parts of the casual ward inmates. All the actors were clothed and very little effort was made to make the “ladies” appear to be men and boys.
All the Ladies discovered in this scene filling the 6 beds in the back row of each side of the stage. Handkerchiefs tied round their heads. 3 beds discovered empty…. All the Ladies supposed to be dressed as boys … Barefooted—no shoes … The ladies being hidden under the rugs need not go into male attire though they are supposed to be boys.98
The lead roles continued to be played by well-known male actors. For example, at the Britannia, Kay was played by Cecil Pitt, “known for his intimidating size.” Casting Pitt obliterated the sexual ambiguity that had made the slender and androgynous Kay so attractive to Greenwood and the other male casual ward inmates. Perhaps the text of Hazlewood’s play and the casting decisions were meant to encourage viewers who had previously read Greenwood’s “A Night” to forget its homoerotic elements or to reimagine them along more acceptable male-female lines. Regardless of motivation, the theatrical productions of The Casual Ward not only muted condemnation of the workings of the poor law but also concealed the discoveries about sex so essential to Greenwood’s political and social message.
In the weeks between the publication of “A Night” and its appearance on the stage, Greenwood’s revelations played upon “the vitiated and morbid tastes of the lovers of ‘sensation’” and prompted heretofore respectable men and women to play the part of workhouse casuals in their own private dramas.99 Two such performances tickled the fancy of the press. The first involved an army accoutrement maker from Soho, Mr. David Greenhall, who entered the casual ward of St. James Workhouse at 9:15 p.m., ate some bread and gruel, and was shown his berth. During the course of a routine search, the workhouse superintendent discovered that Greenhall possessed 6s. 91/2d. in pocket money, in violation of workhouse rules prohibiting inmates from possessing any property or money. What Greenhall had undertaken as a lighthearted affair soon became a serious legal imbroglio. To make matters worse, the hapless Greenhall inadvertently revealed that he had slept the night before at Greenwich Workhouse. Insisting that his masquerade as a casual was merely a “drunken frolic,” he handed the superintendent his card and demanded release from the casual ward. Instead, he was promptly given into police custody. The next day he stood before the magistrate of the Marlborough Police Court charged with obtaining poor relief under false pretenses. A contrite Greenhall was extremely fortunate that the magistrate agreed to discharge him with only a “severe caution.”100
The second case was more ludicrous in its execution and more severe in its denouement. A boisterous, well-to-do woman ostentatiously took a cab to the Mile End Workhouse and demanded admission to its casual ward. When the porter refused to let her in, she said, “I can demand a lodging in the casual ward; you are only a gate-porter, and the orders, rules, and regulations of the Poor Law Board are to take in all who claim admission.” Fearing a row, the porter admitted her to the female casual ward only to find that she had illegally brought 17s. 17 1/2d. with her. To the delight and amusement of the press and public, the magistrate at the Thames Police Court, Mr. Paget, “rewarded” the woman’s impudence and ignorance of the details of the Houseless Poor Act with a month’s hard labor in prison.101 Was her punishment less forgiving than Greenhall’s because she had the misfortune to face a less gentle magistrate? Or was she perhaps being punished not only for violating workhouse regulations but also for flouting accepted notions of female behavior? What a “lady” could and could not do troubled the medical doctor J. H. Stallard, who insisted that the public had a right to hear the women’s side of the story and learn about the female casual ward. Claiming that a true lady (unlike a true gentleman) could never pass for a tramp, Stallard hired a destitute but once respectable widow to penetrate four different casual wards and report to him her harrowing findings. Unlike the calculated titillation of “A Night,” the widow’s narrative is singularly devoid of “hideous enjoyments.” Instead, she underscores her terror at the ubiquitous vermi
n and her belief that cholera was generated every night in the Whitechapel Casual Ward.102
Vestrymen, Poor Law Principles, and Sodomy
If the cases of Greenhall and the ill-fated woman at the Mile End Workhouse provided comic relief for the general public, the unfolding drama of “A Night” was no laughing matter for the workhouse officials and vestrymen of Lambeth. In marked contrast to the self-serving solidarity displayed by the Lambeth Board of Guardians in their closed weekly meetings,103 the public meetings of the Lambeth vestry were rancorous. Mr. Stiff, representing the Third Ward, spoke for the overwhelming majority of his peers when he insisted that he was not disturbed by the charges levelled by the Amateur Casual because he was confident that “the Guardians had done their duty.” The rector of Lambeth, Rev. Lingham, was even less apologetic. He had personally gone to inspect the workhouse and casual wards and had been impressed by their “well ordered comforts.” In vituperative language, he denounced the Pall Mall Gazette articles as pernicious misrepresentations. Lingham’s ill-tempered remarks released a flood of anticlerical invective. An enraged correspondent to Reynold’s, a paper renowned for its plebian radicalism, used the occasion to denounce the clergy in general as “toadies of the rich,” who were “nothing better than a spiritual police by which the minds of the oppressed millions are bludgeoned into cowardly submission to all sorts of legalized cruelties.” The writer declared that clergymen were “reverend quack doctors” who administered “stupifying opiates to an infatuated society reposing on a volcano.”104 Only two Lambeth vestrymen dared to brave the anger of their colleagues and supported the findings of the Amateur Casual. Mr. France “had been to the workhouse and found everything as he had read it in the paper.” Mr. Giles praised the Gazette and apologized for the conduct of the guardians. The author of “A Night” deserved “a testimonial from his country.” It was only his heroic visit to the casual ward that rescued the poor from the horrors of the shed, and he urged his colleagues to show kindness to the “poor outcasts” in their midst.105