by Koven, Seth
The London and provincial papers blasted Lambeth’s “Bumbledom,” Dickens’s famous term for inept officials. The Daily News was particularly vexed that the vestrymen of Lambeth had “passed over” in complete silence “the dire moral disorder in the pump shed” while “the great anxiety of the Guardians was to prove that they had kept the filthiest of scoundrels warm and comfortable.” The guardians “might have opened a public brothel in the parish,” insisted the Daily News, “and maintained it out of the rates with less scandal than they have caused by tolerating in their ignorance the commission of nameless abominations in the parish workhouse.” “What is really ‘in its trial’ now,” the article concluded, “is the capacity of our local bodies for the duties of local government.”106 In the aftermath of the publication of “A Night,” controlling the sexual conduct of male casuals became the touchstone of debate between supporters of local self-government in London and those who called for increased centralization.107
The public humiliation of Lambeth’s workhouse officials and vestrymen was not yet over. In the fortnight following the publication of “A Night,” reporters for The Daily News repeatedly inspected at night the Lambeth Workhouse and the licensed lodging house to which it sent excess casuals. To their amazement, they discovered that arrangements for casuals remained “as shamefully inefficient as before the recent exposure.” The certified lodging house made a mockery of the beautifully ordered “show rooms” that the Lambeth guardians put on display for visitors. More than a dozen men and boys were packed into a tiny room holding six bedsteads.
They were all perfectly naked, and had clustered together for the sake of animal heat, just as sleeping swine are seen to do…. The naked sleepers had rugs for covering, and on an adventurous visitor turning down one of these the brawny figures of three muscular tramps—bare as when they came into the world—were seen to be entwined together, an indistinguishable mass of naked flesh. Youths lay in the arms of men, men were enfolded in each other’s embrace; there was neither fire, nor light nor supervision, and the weak and feeble were at the complete mercy of the strong and ruffianly. The air was laden with a pestilential stench.
Only the inmates’ exhaustion saved the journalists from witnessing “any active or boisterous devilry.”108 The message of the Daily News was clear: official inspections, like “show” beds and “show” wards, are untrustworthy shams that mislead the public.
Workhouse controversies placed the president of the Poor Law Board, Charles Pelham Villiers, and his inspectors, especially H. B. Farnall, in an awkward and vulnerable position.109 On the one hand, they were acutely embarrassed by revelations of workhouse abuses because they had ultimate responsibility for—and hence a substantial stake in preserving the reputation of—the institutions they regulated. On the other hand, press reports stirred up public opinion and put extreme pressure on local officials to comply fully with the demands of poor-law inspectors. In this respect, the press was an invaluable ally in the Poor Law Board’s decades long struggle to increase its authority over intransigent and uncooperative local guardians and vestrymen. Furthermore, Villiers had himself taken a particularly keen interest in the problems associated with vagrancy and as early as 1863 had issued strongly worded minutes (administrative orders) demanding more humane conditions and competent administration of casual wards. Only two weeks before “A Night” appeared, the poor-law inspector Andrew Doyle submitted his massive and insightful study of vagrancy and casual wards to Villiers.110 Villiers was no villain in the casual-ward scandal.
Even Edwin Chadwick, the sole surviving member of the original Poor Law Commission, entered the controversy to defend himself and the principles of the landmark 1834 New Poor Law. He and his fellow commissioners had long ago recognized and provided practical remedies to the problems supposedly “discovered” in the winter of 1865–66. The current scandals resulted entirely from “disorganization” and “maladministration” by officials who refused to implement the “established administrative principles” of consolidation and centralization of authority, aggregation of distinct classes of paupers, and their segregation into metropolitan-wide institutions.111 For Chadwick, whose rationalizing initiatives had been repeatedly thwarted during his stormy career as a civil servant, the workhouse scandals of 1866 were merely local symptoms of a more global disease in the administration of the poor law.
A concerned correspondent to the Poor Law Board, John Wilson, was unwilling to mention sodomy as the most dangerous and contagious vice festering in the workhouses; but the remedies he proposed to the “evils in the casual wards” were more imaginative and more likely than Chadwick’s to impede sex between men in the workhouse. Wilson suggested the construction of individual sleeping cubicles—6 feet high, 2–3 feet wide, and 8 feet deep—with a suspended hammock into which only one person could enter.112 Needless to say, the high costs of implementing such a scheme and the harsh isolation it would have imposed on the poor guaranteed that the proposal garnered support from no one. It does however highlight just how difficult it was to design and administer all-male casual wards as spaces immune to sodomitical contamination.
It should come as no surprise that Chadwick and every other poor-law reformer and activist conspicuously ignored the role of sex in the workhouse scandal. For Chadwick to acknowledge that workhouses could be made into male brothels would have made a mockery of the Malthusian and Benthamite principles of political economy underpinning the New Poor Law. At least in theory, poor-law officials could separate husbands from wives, the deserving from the undeserving poor, and the sick from the able bodied. But how could officials identify and separate sodomites from other men and boys? While that task defied even the classificatory genius of Chadwick, it was nonetheless essential to safeguarding the moral and physical health of the poor. As “A Night” suggested, sodomy was so contagious it threatened to corrupt even innocent bystanders compelled by circumstances to witness it. Chadwick simply could not stretch the logic of the New Poor Law, which intentionally herded men together into cramped and uncomfortable all-male spaces, to accommodate the moral and physical dangers revealed by “A Night.” The sodomitical subtext of “A Night” threw into disarray the social scientific categories underpinning sanitary and poor-law reform. Had Chadwick noted the prevalence of sodomy in the casual ward, he would have been forced to admit the responsibility of poor-law policies and institutions for creating the very conditions that spawned such deviant populations. We can be quite sure that Malthus would have been appalled by the moral dilemma arising from the application of his principle of separating impoverished men and women to check the procreation of more paupers, but might not Bentham, whose philosophical radicalism inspired Chadwick and several other authors of the New Poor Law, allow himself a smile at the entire messy affair? After all, Bentham was not just the creator of Panopticon but also the author of a daring essay arguing that sex between men should not be a crime.113
Science, Sensation, and Charity Organizers
The debate that “A Night” galvanized about the relationship between central and local government cascaded into broader questions about charity organization, social citizenship, class relations, and parliamentary reform. Contemporaries in turn often connected these issues to one another. Greenwood’s articles revealed not only the lack of uniformity among London casual wards, but also the failure of poor-law officials to coordinate their work with the vast and growing machinery of private benevolence in London. Mid-century economic prosperity followed by the cotton famine in Lancashire had encouraged the profuse expansion of philanthropies with no effective apparatus for regulating them and their clients. Many persons who were committed to the emerging science of charity organization wondered why such private charities should continue to exist when their functions had been absorbed by public authorities with the passage of the Houseless Poor Act.114
In the December 1866 issue of Macmillan’s Magazine, the influential Anglican clergyman John Llewelyn Davies provided a thoughtf
ul and wide-ranging analysis of the relationship of the poor law and private charity in light of the “great blots” “discovered in two departments of our workhouse system, in the treatment of vagrants and in the condition of the workhouse infirmaries.” Davies’ analysis merits close examination both because it was a constructive response to “A Night” and because so much of what he had to say soon became the dominant orthodoxy among those metropolitan social reformers who in 1869 would found the Society for Repressing Mendicity and Organizing Charity—better known as the Charity Organisation Society or COS.
In the intervening months between the publication of “A Night” and Davies’ essay, a devastating cholera epidemic had wreaked havoc on London, particularly in the slums of the East End. The outpourings of public benevolence following “A Night” and the epidemic were at once heartwarming and discouraging for Davies. “Gentlemen and ladies,” he observed, “have made it their business to journey from the West-end into the dreary tracts from which luxury and leisure have long fled, to offer sympathy and aid to the suffering.”115 He feared that their slumming and the “sympathy and aid” it produced would further pauperize the poor and reduce their capacity for self-respecting independence by increasing indiscriminate relief on the part of private agencies and encouraging officials to make the workhouses more comfortable. As much as his heart impelled him to “clothe the naked” and “feed the hungry,” such indiscriminate philanthropy, which was favored by many Evangelicals, ultimately failed to meet his test of true Christianity. The key to reducing pauperism, he insisted, depended upon clearly separating, not amalgamating, the work of state-administered poor relief from that of private charity. The poor law should provide relief to “all distress caused immediately by vice or willful folly” (139). While poor-law officials needed to respect the human dignity of recipients of their relief, the vast majority was “the very dregs of the population … worthless and vicious” (132). Voluntary charity should serve those reduced to poverty by illness or by permanent disability (139). He called for the strict organization and coordination of all private charity as a means of checking “importunity and fraud” (133). Based on the principles first put forward by the Scottish divine Thomas Chalmers and the Elberfeld system in Germany, Davies called for the creation of a system of district visitors throughout London. These district visitors would carefully investigate and determine the worthiness of each applicant for relief and ensure that charities worked in concert with one another. “Unreflecting benevolence” (138) would give way to rational management. Davies believed that increased wages and the continuing growth in the dignity of the working classes provided the only hope for solutions, as opposed to amelioratives, to the problem of pauperism. Moving from the reorganization of charity to the Reform Bill, he concluded that if the agitation for the parliamentary franchise indicated “growing self-respect” and “a higher moral standard” among the working classes (142), it augured well for the nation’s future.
Davies was far from isolated among reformers in London. His own ideas evolved in tandem with those of other leaders of charity organization, including the Anglican clergyman, William Henry Fremantle. Fremantle developed a system of dividing his Marylebone parish into small districts to which trained individual charity visitors were assigned. His early recruits included Octavia Hill, Henrietta Rowland (later Barnett), and his curate Samuel Barnett—all of whom were destined to play influential roles in the history of slumming and social welfare. These so-called district visitors coordinated the distribution of private charity, investigated the circumstances and history of individual applicants for relief, and upheld the deterrent principles of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Visitors investigated applicants for charitable relief using a standardized protocol, which in turn became part of a centralized system of data collection. In 1868 and 1869, men and women sharing Davies’ and Fremantle’s views convened a series of metropolitan-wide meetings resulting in the formation of the COS and the rapid expansion of its system of district offices and scientific charity.116
The COS’s first major undertaking was its “Conference on Night Refuges” in the spring of 1870. Their choice of topic reflected the immense impact on the charitable public of Greenwood’s disclosures. Sir Charles Trevelyan opened discussion at the conference and explained the object of the meeting and the events that had precipitated it. He acknowledged that the revelations of the Amateur Casual had led to “a great improvement” in the administration of casual wards.117 Increased administrative effectiveness of casual wards under the terms of the Houseless Poor Act made it all the more vital to determine whether private charitable night refuges ought to continue to exist in the metropolis. Not surprisingly, Trevelyan and the other COS stalwarts in attendance felt strongly that most private night refuges competed with, instead of complemented, the casual wards of poor houses, and they called for them to be disbanded.
Vagrancy remained a major preoccupation of the early leaders of the Charity Organisation Society. Its first organizing secretary, C. J. Ribton-Turner, for example, devoted years of his life to researching and writing his encyclopedic A History of Vagrants and Vagrancy and Beggars and Begging.118 The sober men and women who formed the COS shunned the sensational writing and investigative methods pioneered by Greenwood, but the public interest stimulated by “A Night” and its aftermath helped to set the stage for the COS to organize itself and advance its vision of the proper relationship between the state and private charity. In its protracted struggle to destroy the evangelical philanthropist Dr. Thomas Barnardo in 1877 (see chapter 2), the COS attempted to assert its paramount right to police the boundaries between scientific and sentimental charity, between true and false philanthropists and beggars alike.
Parliamentary Reform and Empire: Racializing the Tramp, Orientalizing the Slum Journalist
Many other commentators like Llewelyn Davies explicitly linked “A Night” to the Reform Bill, which promised to enfranchise at least some respectable, regularly employed working-class men. “If a Reform Bill be really passed, and the artisan influence make itself distinctly felt in the House of Commons,” the Pall Mall Gazette asked, “what will be its action in respect to the proceedings of the guardians of the poor whose selfishness had been exposed by “A Night?” The Gazette looked forward to the enfranchisement of the hardworking and intelligent artisan whose socioeconomic proximity to the poor and disdain for the indolence and “scoundrelism” of parochial officials and paupers alike promised to sweep away the incompetent “reign of Bumbledom” among poorhouse officials. The “better class of artisan would constitute a real aristocracy” to counteract the selfish influence of grocers, publicans, and shoemakers. These petit bourgeois citizens, who openly defied the Poor Law by refusing admission to casuals or not complying with minimal dietary requirements, abetted “crime and vice down to the lowest depths of animal degradation.”119
“A Night” also provided ample fodder for commentary about the relationship between domestic and imperial affairs as well as between race and class anxieties. Greenwood’s literary output in the 1860s suggests that the slums of London and exotic outposts of empire were interchangeable sites of adventure and heroism in his imagination. He wrote “A Night” in between the completion of his London slum novel, The True History of a Little Ragamuffin, and works such as The Adventures of Reuben Davidger, Seventeen Years and Four Months Captive Among the Dyaks of Borneo. He explicitly likened the casual ward inmates to “brutes” he had read about in “books of African travel,” and he clearly was intrigued by what he called “curiosities of savage life” wherever he could find them. Despite his sympathy for the poor and his frank admission that he hankered after the strange freedoms of the lives he chronicled, he described the poorest of the poor as primitive vestiges of “savagery.” In Greenwood’s rhetoric, they lived outside civilization in “anachronistic space” in which the boundary between animals and humans seemed all too easily crossed.120 The “bestial” sexuality of the men and boys in the ca
sual ward was merely an extreme example of a more generalized phenomenon.121
Workhouse casuals occupied an unusual niche at the bottom of the Victorian social hierarchy in which racial, sexual, and class categories and norms converged. “Street arab” and “nomad” were widely used synonyms for the homeless. These terms were figures of speech, but they also drew upon the widely shared assumption that casuals were literally members of a savage race because they existed outside the seat of domesticating, moralizing, and civilizing influences: the home.
If the poor were rhetorically orientalized, so, too, were incognito social investigators, who followed in Greenwood’s footsteps. Journalists and writers who imitated Greenwood’s incognitos claimed that they were going “Haroun Al Raschid,” in homage to the celebrated lateeighth-, early-ninth-century caliph who masqueraded as a poor man to better understand the needs of his subjects.122 G. R. Sims, London’s most famous slum journalist and a consummate master of disguises, recalled that male journalists fancied themselves members of a radical “Bohemian fraternity” bound by none of the conventions of respectable middle-class life.123 Workhouse masters and tramps used precisely the same term to describe the values and way of life of vagrants, who, like journalists, felt a keen sense of solidarity with one another and apartness from the rest of society.124 Just as Greenwood played fast and loose with the boundaries separating participants from observers in his sociological experiment, so, too, incognito journalists and tramps saw themselves as Bohemians who, in defiance of bourgeois respectability, made their living by appearing to not work. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle cleverly explored this ironic affinity in “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” in which the lure of easy money leads the respectable slum journalist to become a professional tramp.125